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IN RETROSPECT

Trapped ion quantum computing turns 25

Nature Reviews Physics volume 2, page 278 (2020)Cite this article

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It is hard to assign a definite date to mark the beginning of the field of quantum computing. Some may trace it back to the famous paper by Richard Feynman from the early 1980s, others may prefer to start with Peter Shor’s 1994 quantum algorithm for factorization or earlier algorithms developed in the early 1990s. But when it comes to the first conception of how to actually build a quantum computer, one result stands out. On 15 May 1995, a paper by Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller was published in Physical Reviews Letters. It showed that atomic ions, trapped in a vacuum and cooled using lasers, could be used as qubits with which elementary quantum logic operations could be performed. The Cirac–Zoller paper turned quantum computing from a bold theoretical idea into an experimental race to build an actual device.

“After several attempts, we came up with an idea to do that using the ‘phonon bus’, which is a set of degrees of freedom shared by all qubits, something that is used now with other platforms as well,” Cirac and Zoller remember. Using lasers, the internal energy levels of the ions can be coupled to the external motional degrees of freedom (the phonon bus) common to ions trapped together. In this way, the information could be communicated between different ions, and conditional operations such as the controlled-NOT gate could be realized.

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References

Original article

  • Cirac, J. I. & Zoller, P. Quantum computations with cold trapped ions. Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 4091 (1995)

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Related articles

  • Feynman, R. Simulating physics with computers. Int. J. Theor. Phys. 21, 467–488 (1982)

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  • Shor, P. W. Algorithms for quantum computation: discrete logarithms and factoring. Proceedings 35th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, Santa Fe, NM, USA, 124–134 (1994)

  • Monroe, C. et al. Demonstration of a fundamental quantum logic gate. Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 4714 (1995)

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  1. Nature Reviews Physics https://www.nature.com/natrevphys/

    Iulia Georgescu

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  1. Iulia Georgescu
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Correspondence to Iulia Georgescu.

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Georgescu, I. Trapped ion quantum computing turns 25. Nat Rev Phys 2, 278 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-020-0189-1

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