Trapped-ion shuttling record pushes two-qubit fidelity past 99.9%
Moving ions between zones used to cost coherence. A revised trap geometry makes transport nearly free.
By Ines Duarte
Written in-house by the Preprint desk — an explainer, not a report of a news event.
- Transport heating reduced by an order of magnitude.
- Two-qubit gate fidelity measured at 99.92% after shuttling.
- Approach favours modular traps over ever-larger single chips.
Trapped-ion architectures win on fidelity and lose on speed. The compromise usually shows up during shuttling, when ions are physically moved between interaction zones and pick up motional heating along the way.
A revised electrode geometry with smoother potential gradients cut that heating by roughly an order of magnitude, letting two-qubit gates after transport hit 99.92% fidelity.
The result strengthens the case for modular ion traps: if moving qubits is cheap, you do not need to build one enormous chip.
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