Oxford Ionics develops trapped-ion quantum computers. We are UK headquartered and opened our US office in Boulder last year. We will present the work we do in Boulder developing our architecture and our future plans to open a lab and grow the team here. We will also discuss our recent acquisition by IonQ and what it means for the companies' joint roadmap.
Following this we will present new technical results on the 'smooth gate' - a novel entangling gate method for trapped-ion qubits where residual motional errors are adiabatically eliminated by ramping the gate detuning. We combine the power of this technique with the robustness of electronic qubit control to perform two-qubit gates with an estimated error of <1e-4 without the use of ground-state cooling. We characterise the gate error using a new protocol (inspired by subspace randomised benchmarking) which does not require the use of any single-qubit rotations. We further show that the error remains <5e-4 for Doppler-cooled ions with gate mode temperatures of up to nbar=9.4(3). These results show that trapped-ion quantum computers can be operated above the Doppler limit, allowing for significantly faster device operation.
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