Errors in trapped-ion quantum gates due to spontaneous photon scattering

Abstract

We analyze the error in trapped-ion, hyperfine qubit, quantum gates due to spontaneous scattering of photons from the gate laser beams. We investigate single-qubit rotations that are based on stimulated Raman transitions and two-qubit entangling phase gates that are based on spin-dependent optical dipole forces. This error is compared between different ion species currently being investigated as possible quantum-information carriers. For both gate types we show that with attainable laser powers the scattering error can be reduced to below current estimates of the fault-tolerance error threshold.