{
  "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.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2610.17583",
  "author_total": 11,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Yue Li"
    },
    {
      "name": "Yuxiang Huang"
    },
    {
      "name": "Yi Li"
    },
    {
      "name": "Xu Cheng"
    },
    {
      "name": "Zihan Xie"
    },
    {
      "name": "Qingyuan Mei"
    },
    {
      "name": "Chang-Ling Zou"
    },
    {
      "name": "Ya Wang"
    },
    {
      "name": "Xinhua Peng"
    },
    {
      "name": "Yiheng Lin"
    },
    {
      "name": "Jiangfeng Du"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/1h6nems30dwrf.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2610.17583",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "1h6nems30dwrf",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17583",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "LicenseRef-arXiv-nonexclusive-1.0",
  "licence_label": "arXiv licence",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "quant-ph"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1702|Quantum Information and Cryptography"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7221783676",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.17583",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-13",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/1h6nems30dwrf.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:29:11Z",
      "native_id": "2610.17583",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17583"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "physics",
      "origin": "arxiv:quant-ph",
      "subfield": "quantum"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Coherent optical control of a thousand qubits in a three-dimensional trapped-ion crystal",
  "title_text": "Coherent optical control of a thousand qubits in a three-dimensional trapped-ion crystal",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:29:11Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/1h6nems30dwrf",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}