Optical tweezer-controlled entanglement gates with trapped ion qubits

Abstract

We propose an entanglement protocol where ions illuminated by optical tweezers serve as control qubits. We experimentally demonstrate this proposal with a controlled M$\o$lmer-S$\o$rensen operation on a three-ion chain, analogous to the canonical Toffoli gate. Our demonstration features cases in which the control qubit was in one of its logical basis states, and not in their superposition, due to dephasing by tweezer beam intensity fluctuations. Finally, we discuss how our protocol generalizes to a broad class of unitary operations and larger qubit systems, enabling a single-pulse implementation of $n$-controlled unitaries.