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arXiv · 2610.17583

Coherent optical control of a thousand qubits in a three-dimensional trapped-ion crystal

Yue Li·Yuxiang Huang·Yi Li·Xu Cheng·Zihan Xie·Qingyuan Mei·Chang-Ling Zou·Ya Wang·Xinhua Peng·Yiheng Lin·Jiangfeng Du
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Abstract

Leading quantum platforms are largely limited to one or two dimensions, whereas three-dimensional Coulomb crystals of trapped ions self-assemble into dense qubit arrays with no rearrangement overhead. Coherent optical control of such crystals has nonetheless been out of reach, because the optical transition couples to nearly all $3N$ collective modes, i.e., a thermally occupied quasi-continuum bath. Here we cool about 3,600 modes of a crystal of over 1,200 ions below single-phonon occupation, using a continuous cooling band that spans more than five octaves in vibrational spectrum, from about 50 kHz to 2.1 MHz. The crystal then serves as a register of optical qubits, allowing global initialization, coherent manipulation and collective detection. We demonstrate ensemble optical coherence of 21.6 milliseconds and reduce the optical-transition frequency uncertainty from 389 Hz for a single ion to 12 Hz for over a thousand ions, approaching the expected projection-noise scaling. Our approach could be extended to even larger crystals with phonon-mediated many-body couplings, opening a route towards entanglement-enhanced precision metrology and three-dimensional quantum simulation, particularly with spatial-shaped illumination for region-resolved collective control.

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Yue Li, Yuxiang Huang, Yi Li, Xu Cheng, Zihan Xie, Qingyuan Mei, Chang-Ling Zou, Ya Wang, Xinhua Peng, Yiheng Lin, Jiangfeng Du. 2026-10-13. Coherent optical control of a thousand qubits in a three-dimensional trapped-ion crystal. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17583

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