Sandia-Based QSCOUT a 5-Year DOE Program to Build Quantum Testbed Available to Research Community

(Sandia.gov)
The Quantum Scientific Computing Open User Testbed (QSCOUT) is a 5-year DOE program funded by the Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program to build a quantum testbed based on trapped ions that is available to the research community. As an open platform, it will not only provide full specifications and control for the realization of all high- level quantum and classical processes, it will also enable researchers to investigate, alter, and optimize the internals of the testbed and test more advanced implementations of quantum operations. QSCOUT will be made operational in stages, with each stage adding more ion qubits, greater classical control, and improved fidelities. We will leverage the specific strengths of trapped ion systems: the identical qubits with long qubit coherence times, the high-fidelity single and multi-qubit operations possible in these systems, the low cross-talk addressing of individual qubits in the register, and the all-to-all connectivity available in trapped ion quantum registers. In the first stage, we will make a quantum register of 3 qubits available. Parallel single qubit gates and sequential two-qubit Mølmer-Sørensen gates between any pair of qubits will be available. Target fidelities for single qubit operations are 99.5%, target fidelities for two-qubit gates are 98%. At the beginning of a computation, each quantum bit is prepared in the |0〉 state of the z-basis. At the end of a computation the entire quantum register is measured in the z-basis. For each measurement of the quantum register, the state of each qubit will be available to users.
QSCOUT is led by Dr. Susan Clark at Sandia in collaboration with a team of AMO physicists, quantum computing theorists, engineers, and computer scientists. In addition, Peter Love (Tufts University) and Ken Brown (Duke University) provide theory support.
The QSCOUT hardware will be realized as a trapped ion system. A chain of ytterbium ions will be stored in a Sandia surface ion trap, which offers excellent optical access for state preparation, detection and qubit manipulations.