High-fidelity preparation, gates, memory and readout of a trapped-ion quantum bit

We implement all single-qubit operations with fidelities significantly above the minimum threshold required for fault-tolerant quantum computing, using a trapped-ion qubit stored in hyperfine "atomic clock" states of $^{43}$Ca$^+$. We measure a combined qubit state preparation and single-shot readout fidelity of 99.93%, a memory coherence time of $T^*_2=50$ seconds, and an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.9999%. These results are achieved in a room-temperature microfabricated surface trap, without the use of magnetic field shielding or dynamic decoupling techniques to overcome technical noise.Comment: Supplementary Information included. 6 nines, 7 figures, 8 page

Background-free detection of trapped ions

We demonstrate a Doppler cooling and detection scheme for ions with low-lying D levels which almost entirely suppresses scattered laser light background, while retaining a high fluorescence signal and efficient cooling. We cool a single ion with a laser on the 2S1/2 to 2P1/2 transition as usual, but repump via the 2P3/2 level. By filtering out light on the cooling transition and detecting only the fluorescence from the 2P_3/2 to 2S1/2 decays, we suppress the scattered laser light background count rate to 1 per second while maintaining a signal of 29000 per second with moderate saturation of the cooling transition. This scheme will be particularly useful for experiments where ions are trapped in close proximity to surfaces, such as the trap electrodes in microfabricated ion traps, which leads to high background scatter from the cooling beam

Heating rate and electrode charging measurements in a scalable, microfabricated, surface-electrode ion trap

We characterise the performance of a surface-electrode ion "chip" trap fabricated using established semiconductor integrated circuit and micro-electro-mechanical-system (MEMS) microfabrication processes which are in principle scalable to much larger ion trap arrays, as proposed for implementing ion trap quantum information processing. We measure rf ion micromotion parallel and perpendicular to the plane of the trap electrodes, and find that on-package capacitors reduce this to <~ 10 nm in amplitude. We also measure ion trapping lifetime, charging effects due to laser light incident on the trap electrodes, and the heating rate for a single trapped ion. The performance of this trap is found to be comparable with others of the same size scale.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figure

Clustering time series with clipped data

Clustering time series is a problem that has applications in a wide variety of fields, and has recently attracted a large amount of research. Time series data are often large and may contain outliers. We show that the simple procedure of clipping the time series (discretising to above or below the median) reduces memory requirements and significantly speeds up clustering without decreasing clustering accuracy. We also demonstrate that clipping increases clustering accuracy when there are outliers in the data, thus serving as a means of outlier detection and a method of identifying model misspecification. We consider simulated data from polynomial, autoregressive moving average and hidden Markov models and show that the estimated parameters of the clipped data used in clustering tend, asymptotically, to those of the unclipped data. We also demonstrate experimentally that, if the series are long enough, the accuracy on clipped data is not significantly less than the accuracy on unclipped data, and if the series contain outliers then clipping results in significantly better clusterings. We then illustrate how using clipped series can be of practical benefit in detecting model misspecification and outliers on two real world data sets: an electricity generation bid data set and an ECG data set