Coherent optical control of a thousand qubits in a three-dimensional trapped-ion crystal
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.
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BibTeX
@misc{li2026coherent,
title = {{Coherent optical control of a thousand qubits in a three-dimensional trapped-ion crystal}},
author = {Yue Li and Yuxiang Huang and Yi Li and Xu Cheng and Zihan Xie and Qingyuan Mei and Chang-Ling Zou and Ya Wang and Xinhua Peng and Yiheng Lin and Jiangfeng Du},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.17583},
eprint = {2610.17583},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17583},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Coherent optical control of a thousand qubits in a three-dimensional trapped-ion crystal
AU - Yue Li
AU - Yuxiang Huang
AU - Yi Li
AU - Xu Cheng
AU - Zihan Xie
AU - Qingyuan Mei
AU - Chang-Ling Zou
AU - Ya Wang
AU - Xinhua Peng
AU - Yiheng Lin
AU - Jiangfeng Du
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.17583
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17583
AB - 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.
ER -