Demonstration of three- and four-body interactions between trapped-ion spins

Understand

Quantum processors use the native interactions between effective spins to simulate Hamiltonians or execute quantum gates.

• In most processors, the native interactions are pairwise, limiting the efficiency of controlling entanglement between many qubits.
• Here we experimentally demonstrate a new class of native interactions between trapped-ion qubits, extending conventional pairwise interactions to higher order.
• We realize three- and four-body spin interactions as examples, showing that high-order spin polynomials may serve as a new toolbox for quantum information applications.