Control and Readout of a 13-level Trapped Ion Qudit

Understand

To implement useful quantum algorithms which demonstrate quantum advantage, we must scale currently demonstrated quantum computers up significantly.

• Leading platforms such as trapped ions face physical challenges in including more information carriers.
• A less explored avenue for scaling up the computational space involves utilizing the rich energy level structure of a trapped ion to encode multi-level qudits rather than two-level qubits.
• Here we show control and single-shot readout of qudits with up to 13 computational states, using protocols which can be extended directly to manipulate qudits of up to 25 levels in our chosen information host, $^{137}\text{Ba}^{+}$.