Reconfigurable and Programmable Ion Trap Quantum Computer

We present progress on the operation of quantum computers built with trapped atomic ion qubits. Based on the technological underpinnings of atomic clocks that define time, atomic qubits are standards of quantum information because they are all identical. They present a fundamentally scalable approach to quantum computation where interactions can be faithfully replicated and measured with near-perfect efficiency. Unlike many other approaches to quantum hardware, trapped ion qubits operate effectively at room-temperature, and even allow for fully reconfigurable quantum circuits, much like an FPGA in classical computation. This flexibility will likely allow ion trap quantum computers to express the superset of all known quantum computation operations, and thus efficiently target any type of application that arises.