Scalable improvement of the generalized Toffoli gate realization using trapped-ion-based qutrits

An efficient implementation of the Toffoli gate is of conceptual importance for running various quantum algorithms, including Grover's search and Shor's integer factorization. However, direct realizations of the Toffoli gate require either a prohibitive growth of the number of two-qubit gates or using ancilla qubits, whereas both of these resources are limited in the current generation of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. Here we experimentally demonstrate a scalable improvement of the realization of the Toffoli gate using $^{171}$Yb$^{+}$ trapped-ion-based dual-type optic-microwave qutrits ($d=3$) for the cases of three-, four-qubit and five-qubit versions of the Toffoli gate. With the use of the Molmer-Sorensen gate as a basic two-particle operation, we compare the standard qubit decomposition with the qutrit approach, where upper levels are used as ancillas. The presented decomposition requires only global control of the ancilla levels, which simplifies experimental implementation of the proposed approach. We present an estimation of the scalable improvement of our approach in the case of multi-qubit gates. As we expect, by combining this approach with the leveraging qudits ($d\geq4$) as a set of qubits, our approach may lead to a more efficient realization of various quantum algorithms. With qutrit-based decomposition in Grover's search with three ions, we experimentally demonstrate the 10\% increase in the average algorithm performance.
Comment: 8+4 pages, 4+5 figures