Quantum process tomography of a Mølmer-Sørensen interaction

Abstract

We present a simple tomographic protocol, for two-qubit systems, that relies on a single discriminatory transition and no direct spatially selective imaging. This scheme exploits excess micromotion in the trap to realize all operations required to prepare all input states and analyze all output states. We demonstrate a two-qubit entangling gate with a Bell state production fidelity of 0.981(6), and apply the above protocol to perform the first quantum process tomography of a M\o{}lmer-S\o{}rensen entangling gate. We characterize its $\ensuremath{\chi}$-process matrix, the simplest for an entanglement gate on a separable-states basis, and observe that our dominant source of error is accurately modeled by a quantum depolarization channel.