Researchers demonstrated a new method of cooling trapped ions using chip-based systems, which could enable more stable and scalable quantum computers and quantum sensors.

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MIT researchers developed a new chip-based cooling method for trapped-ion quantum computers that achieves temperatures 10 times below standard laser cooling limits in about 100 microseconds. The technique uses precisely designed nanoscale antennas on photonic chips to create intersecting light beams with different polarizations, forming a rotating vortex that efficiently reduces ion vibrations. This polarization-gradient cooling approach eliminates the need for bulky external optical equipment, enabling more scalable quantum computing architectures with thousands of ion sites on a single chip while improving stability and reducing errors.

Efficient cooling method could enable chip-based quantum computers