The physics of interacting integer-spin chains has been a topic of intense theoretical interest, particularly in the context of symmetry-protected topological phases. However, there has not been a controllable model system to study this physics experimentally. We demonstrate how spin-dependent forces on trapped ions can be used to engineer an effective system of interacting spin-1 particles. Our system evolves coherently under an applied spin-1 XY Hamiltonian with tunable, long-range couplings, and all three quantum levels at each site participate in the dynamics. We observe the time evolution of the system and verify its coherence by entangling a pair of effective three-level particles ("qutrits") with 86% fidelity. By adiabatically ramping a global field, we produce ground states of the XY model, and we demonstrate an instance where the ground state cannot be created without breaking the same symmetries that protect the topological Haldane phase. This experimental platform enables future studies of symmetry-protected order in spin-1 systems and their use in quantum applications.

Trapped ions are a promising tool for building a large-scale quantum computer. However, the number of required radiation fields for the realisation of quantum gates in any proposed ion-based architecture scales with the number of ions within the quantum computer, posing a major obstacle when imagining a device with millions of ions. Here we present a fundamentally different concept for trapped-ion quantum computing where this detrimental scaling entirely vanishes, replacing millions of radiation fields with only a handful of fields. The method is based on individually controlled voltages applied to each logic gate location to facilitate the actual gate operation analogous to a traditional transistor architecture within a classical computer processor. To demonstrate the key principle of this approach we implement a versatile quantum gate method based on long-wavelength radiation and use this method to generate a maximally entangled state of two quantum engineered clock-qubits with fidelity 0.985(12). This quantum gate also constitutes a simple-to-implement tool for quantum metrology, sensing and simulation.

A proposal to use trapped ions to implement spin-one XXZ antiferromagnetic chains as an experimental tool to explore the Haldane phase is presented. We explain how to reach the Haldane phase adiabatically, demonstrate the robustness of the ground states to noise in the magnetic field and Rabi frequencies, and propose a way to detect them using their characteristics: an excitation gap and exponentially decaying correlations, a nonvanishing nonlocal string order, and a double degenerate entanglement spectrum. Scaling up to higher dimensions and more frustrated lattices, we obtain richer phase diagrams, and we can reach spin liquid phase, which can be detected by its entanglement entropy which obeys the boundary law.

The coherence times achieved with continuous dynamical decoupling techniques are often limited by fluctuations in the driving amplitude. In this work, we use time-dependent phase-modulated continuous driving to increase the robustness against such fluctuations in a dense ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond. Considering realistic experimental errors in the system, we identify the optimal modulation strength, and demonstrate an improvement of an order of magnitude in the spin-preservation of arbitrary states over conventional single continuous driving. The phase-modulated driving exhibits comparable results to previously examined amplitude-modulated techniques, and is expected to outperform them in experimental systems having higher phase accuracy. The proposed technique could open new avenues for quantum information processing and many body physics, in systems dominated by high-frequency spin-bath noise, for which pulsed dynamical decoupling is less effective. PACS numbers: 76.30.Mi One of the main challenges in quantum information processing, quantum computing and quantum sensing is the preservation of arbitrary spin states. For example, the sensitivity of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) ensemble-based AC magneteometry scales as a square-root of the coherence time [1-8]. Moreover, long ensemble spin coherence times could open new avenues for studying many body dynamics of interacting spins [9-11]. The commonly used technique for improving coherence times and preserving arbitrary states is dynamical decoupling (DD) sequences [12-18]. Although pulsed DD is very efficient for a variety of physical systems, continuous driving-based decoupling (i.e. spin-lock) has an advantage when the power spectrum of the noise bath contains a significant contribution from high-frequency terms, such that relevant correlation times are shorter than the duty cycle achievable by pulsed techniques [15, 16]. However, in these continuous schemes, amplitude fluctuations of the driving source itself limit the achieved coherence times, raising the need for a fault tolerant driving [16, 18-23]. One common approach for overcoming fluctuations in the driving amplitude is to flip the phase of the continuous driving every time increment τ (i.e., to apply a "rotary echo", [24]). However, in the basis of the dressed states, these techniques are equivalent to pulsed DD, having the same disadvantages, such as additional imperfections due to the application of non-ideal pulses, and the disability of mitigating amplitude fluctuations that are faster than the flipping rate 1/τ. Another approach for overcoming these fluctuations is to apply an additional continuous driving in the perpendicular axis [Fig. 1(a)]. In order to avoid the use of an extra microwave (MW) source, the same effective Hamiltonian can be generated by a time-dependent modulation of the amplitude or phase of the original driving. Recently, such time-dependent amplitude modulation was experimentally demonstrated in a system of single isolated NV centers, achieving an order of magnitu...

The coherence times achieved with continuous dynamical decoupling techniques are often limited by fluctuations in the driving amplitude. In this work, we use time-dependent phase-modulated continuous driving to increase the robustness against such fluctuations in a dense ensemble of nitrogenvacancy centers in diamond. Considering realistic experimental errors in the system, we identify the optimal modulation strength, and demonstrate an improvement of an order of magnitude in the spinpreservation of arbitrary states over conventional single continuous driving. The phase-modulated driving exhibits comparable results to previously examined amplitude-modulated techniques, and is expected to outperform them in experimental systems having higher phase accuracy. The proposed technique could open new avenues for quantum information processing and many body physics, in systems dominated by high-frequency spin-bath noise, for which pulsed dynamical decoupling is less effective. PACS numbers: 76.30.MiOne of the main challenges in quantum information processing, quantum computing and quantum sensing is the preservation of arbitrary spin states. For example, the sensitivity of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) ensemble-based AC magneteometry scales as a square-root of the coherence time [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Moreover, long ensemble spin coherence times could open new avenues for studying many body dynamics of interacting spins [9][10][11]. The commonly used technique for improving coherence times and preserving arbitrary states is dynamical decoupling (DD) sequences [12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Although pulsed DD is very efficient for a variety of physical systems, continuous driving-based decoupling (i.e. spin-lock) has an advantage when the power spectrum of the noise bath contains a significant contribution from high-frequency terms, such that relevant correlation times are shorter than the duty cycle achievable by pulsed techniques [15,16]. However, in these continuous schemes, amplitude fluctuations of the driving source itself limit the achieved coherence times, raising the need for a fault tolerant driving [16,[18][19][20][21][22][23].One common approach for overcoming fluctuations in the driving amplitude is to flip the phase of the continuous driving every time increment τ (i.e., to apply a "rotary echo", [24]). However, in the basis of the dressed states, these techniques are equivalent to pulsed DD, having the same disadvantages, such as additional imperfections due to the application of non-ideal pulses, and the disability of mitigating amplitude fluctuations that are faster than the flipping rate 1/τ . Another approach for overcoming these fluctuations is to apply an additional continuous driving in the perpendicular axis [ Fig. 1(a)]. In order to avoid the use of an extra microwave (MW) source, the same effective Hamiltonian can be generated by a time-dependent modulation of the amplitude or phase of the original driving. Recently, such time-dependent amplitude modulation was experimentally demonstrated in a system o...