Trapping Ba+ with seven-fold enhanced efficiency utilizing an autoionizing resonance

Abstract

Trapped ions have emerged as a front runner in quantum information processing due to their identical nature, all-to-all connectivity, and high fidelity quantum operations. As current trapped ion technologies are scaled, it will be important to improve the efficiency of loading ions, which is currently the slowest process in operating a trapped ion quantum computer. Here, we compare two isotope-selective photoionization schemes for loading Ba+ ions. We show that a two-step photoionization scheme ending in an autoionizing transition increases the ion loading rate nearly an order of magnitude compared to an established technique which does not excite an autoionizing state.
The only additional technology required to implement the autoionizing transition is a commercial diode laser. Our technique can be extended to all isotopes of barium, and autoionizing resonances exist in every species currently used for trapped ion quantum processing, making this a promising technique to drastically increase the loading rates for all trapped ion computers.