| A phase-locked scanning stability transfer cavity (SSTC) for transferring the absolute frequency stability of an iodine referenced He-Ne (master) laser to three otherwise uncalibrated (slave) lasers (at 844, 1033, & 1092 nm) of a trapped-Sr+ quantum information processing (QIP) apparatus is described. When locked, the 422 nm frequency-doubled Doppler-cooling laser exhibits an error of <1 MHz RMS for several hours, and similar stability is achieved with the other slave lasers. When unlocked, each slave laser drifts by a large fraction (or more) of the corresponding transition linewidth in minutes, thus making reliable laser cooling, ion state readout, and execution of QIP algorithms practically infeasible. The SSTC makes coherent control of Sr+ possible by addressing this problem, and the QIP apparatus is now sufficiently stable for single user operation. New single-ion experimental capabilities include ground state cooling, high-fidelity Rabi flopping, Ramsey interferometry, and sympathetic cooling of 88Sr+( 86Sr+) with 86Sr+( 88Sr+). A 2.5 msec coherence time has been achieved with the optical quoit encoded in a |5 2S 1/2⟩ ↔ |4 2D5/2⟩ quadrupole transition, a precision measurement of the isotope shift of the qubit transition in 86Sr+ relative to 88Sr+ is reported, and a single-ion heating rate consistent with results throughout the trapped-ion community is reported. The SSTC is simple to implement, uses no custom optics, and it has a higher scanning rate than previously demonstrated SSTC's. Phase-locked SSTC's are shown to have an advantage over the more common displacement-locked SSTC in the low finesse regime, and they are an attractive alternative to passively stable but complex optical references and diode lasers designed to address the same problem. The SSTC is useful in spectroscopic applications with other ion species, atoms, and molecules, in general. An appendix is dedicated to describing in detail an advanced trapped-ion quantum processor concept referred to here as the quantum Field Programmable Gate Array (q-FPGA), which has been jointly developed by John Chiaverini and this author in an ongoing collaboration. It virtually eliminates decoherence from spontaneous emission, and it also mitigates much of the laser and optical engineering requirements associated with conceptually similar devices.;LANL technical release number LA-UR 09-08135... |
