Phys.org  February 6, 2024 In current QCCD implementations, imperfect ion transport and anomalous heating can excite ion motion during a calculation. To counteract this, intermediate cooling is necessary to maintain high-fidelity gate performance. Cooling the computational ions sympathetically with ions of another species creates a significant runtime bottleneck. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrated exchange cooling which does not require trapping two different atomic species. They introduced a bank of “coolant” ions which were repeatedly laser cooled. A computational ion could be cooled by transporting a coolant ion into its proximity. Experimentally they tested this concept and executed […]