Pulsed lasers offer significant advantages over continuous wave (CW) lasers in the coherent control of qubits. Here we review the theoretical and experimental aspects of controlling the internal and external states of individual trapped atoms with pulse trains. Two distinct regimes of laser intensity are identified. When the pulses are sufficiently weak that the Rabi frequency Ω is much smaller than the trap frequency ω trap, sideband transitions can be addressed and atom-atom entanglement can be accomplished in much the same way as with CW lasers. By contrast, if the pulses are very strong Ω ≫ω trap, impulsive spin-dependent kicks can be combined to create entangling gates which are much faster than a trap period. These fast entangling gates should work outside of the Lamb-Dicke regime and be insensitive to thermal atomic motion. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

We report entanglement of a single atom's hyperfine spin state with its motional state in a time scale of less than 3 ns. We engineer a short train of intense laser pulses to impart a spin-dependent momentum transfer of ± 2 ħk. Using pairs of momentum kicks, we create an atomic interferometer and demonstrate collapse and revival of spin coherence as the motional wave packet is split and recombined. The revival after a pair of kicks occurs only when the second kick is delayed by an integer multiple of the harmonic trap period, a signature of entanglement and disentanglement of the spin with the motion. Such quantum control opens a new regime of ultrafast entanglement in atomic qubits.

Trapped atomic ions are standards for quantum information processing, as all of the fundamental quantum operations have been demonstrated in small collections of atoms. Current work is concentrated on scaling ion traps to larger numbers of interacting qubits and the generation of massive entangled states. We discuss progress in the quantum networking of trapped atomic ions, using the Coulomb interaction for demonstrations of simple quantum simulations of magnetism, ultrafast laser pulses for entanglement, and finally probabilistic photonic interactions to bridge entanglement over long distances. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.