Individual addressing of ion qubits with counter-propagating optical frequency combs

Abstract

We propose a new method of individual single-qubit addressing of linear trapped-ion chains utilizing two ultrastable femtosecond frequency combs. For that, we suggest implementing the single-qubit gates with two counter-propagating frequency combs overlapping on the target ion and causing the AC Stark shift between the qubit levels. With analytical calculations and numerical modeling, we show that the arbitrary single-qubit rotations can be indeed realized using only laser fields propagating along the ion chain. We analyze the error sources for the proposed addressing method and prove that it allows implementing the single-qubit gates with high fidelity.