Correcting the effects of spontaneous emission on cold trapped ions

Abstract

We propose two quantum error correction schemes which increase the maximum storage time for qubits in a system of cold trapped ions, using a minimal number of ancillary qubits. Both schemes consider only the errors introduced by the decoherence due to spontaneous emission from the upper levels of the ions. Continuous monitoring of the ion fluorescence is used in conjunction with selective coherent feedback to eliminate these errors immediately following spontaneous emission events, and the conditional time evolution between quantum jumps is removed by symmetrizing the quantum codewords.