Trapped Ion Qubits
Qubits built from electrically charged atoms (ions) held in electromagnetic traps and manipulated with lasers. Currently the highest gate fidelity of any qubit modality.
Trapped ion qubits use ions, atoms that have been given an electric charge by removing one electron, as their quantum elements. The ions are confined in electromagnetic traps (typically Paul traps or Penning traps), which hold them suspended in a vacuum. Lasers are then used to cool the ions, initialize their quantum states, perform quantum gate operations, and read out the results.
Trapped ion systems hold the current record for quantum gate fidelity, meaning the precision with which quantum operations can be executed. Quantinuum's H-Series systems have demonstrated two-qubit gate fidelity above 99.9%, the highest published figure for any commercial quantum computing system.
The physics behind trapped ion quantum computing traces directly to the work of David Wineland at NIST Boulder, for which he received the 2012 Nobel Prize. Wineland's group demonstrated the first quantum gates with trapped ions in the 1990s.
Quantinuum in Broomfield, Colorado is the global leader in trapped ion quantum computing. Their work descends directly from David Wineland's Nobel Prize-winning research at NIST Boulder. The Honeywell quantum computing program that became Quantinuum was established specifically to commercialize Wineland's foundational work.