Chip scale coil stabilized Brillouin laser driving a room temperature trapped ion qubit
Photonic integrated stable, ultra-low-noise lasers are essential for scalable and portable quantum information systems. Trapped ions are a leading modality for quantum computing and optical clocks, with room-temperature operation enabling portable applications. Current systems rely on free-space lasers and stabilization cavities, frequency conversion, and cryogenic infrastructure, limiting size, weight, and power. We demonstrate a chip-scale coil-stabilized 674 nm Brillouin laser driving qubit state preparation and measurement and the optical clock transition in a room-temperature surface electrode trapped <sup>88</sup>Sr<sup>+</sup> ion without a bulk-optic reference cavity. The CMOS compatible silicon nitride integrated 3-meter coil and Brillouin laser achieve 8.8×10<sup>-13</sup> stability at 20 ms, sufficient to interrogate the 0.4 Hz quadrupole optical clock transition. The ion-disciplined laser achieves 5.3 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mo>×</mml:mo><mml:msup><mml:mrow><mml:mn>10</mml:mn></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mo>-</mml:mo><mml:mn>13</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msup><mml:mo>/</mml:mo><mml:msqrt><mml:mrow><mml:mi>τ</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:msqrt></mml:math> stability, spectroscopy with 1.5 kHz linewidths, and 99.6% qubit state preparation and measurement fidelity. These results light the way towards integration of stabilized lasers with trapped-ion chips for portable and robust quantum technologies.
Authors
- Christopher Caron
- Andrei Isichenko (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5373-4396)
- K. Liu
- Robert Niffenegger (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0226-1736)
- Nitesh Chauhan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7375-3690)
- Meiting Song (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4290-6671)
- Daniel J. Blumenthal (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1735-7220)
- Nishat Helaly
- Zhenyu Wei
- Jiawei Wang
Institutions
- University of California, Santa Barbara (US)
- University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2026-03-03
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69948-2
- Primary Topic
- Advanced Frequency and Time Standards
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- U.S. Department of Defense
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Army Research Office