Driven geometric phase gates with trapped ions

Abstract

Abstract We describe a hybrid laser–microwave scheme to implement two-qubit geometric phase gates in crystals of trapped ions. The proposed gates can attain errors below the fault-tolerance threshold in the presence of thermal, dephasing, laser-phase and microwave-intensity noise. Moreover, our proposal is technically less demanding than previous schemes, since it does not require a laser arrangement with interferometric stability. The laser beams are tuned close to a single vibrational sideband to entangle the qubits, while strong microwave drivings provide the geometric character to the gate, and thus protect the qubits from these different sources of noise. A thorough analytic and numerical study of the performance of these gates in realistic noisy regimes is presented.