How Correlated Adsorbate Dynamics on Realistic Substrates Can Give Rise to 1/ω Electric-Field Noise in Surface Ion Traps

Abstract: Ion traps are promising architectures for implementing scalable quantum computing, but they suffer from excessive "anomalous" heating that prevents their full potential from being realized. This heating, which is orders of magnitude larger than that expected from Johnson-Nyquist noise, results in ion motion that leads to decoherence and reduced fidelity in quantum logic gates. The exact origin of anomalous heating is an open question, but experiments point to adsorbates on trap electrodes as a likely source. Many different models of anomalous heating have been proposed, but these models have yet to pinpoint the atomistic origin of the experimentally-observed $1/\omega$ electric field noise scaling observed in ion traps at frequencies between 0.1-10 MHz. In this work, we perform the first computational study of the ion trap electric field noise produced by the motions of multiple monolayers of adsorbates described by first principles potentials. In so doing, we show that correlated adsorbate motions play a definitive role in producing $1/\omega$ noise and identify candidate collective adsorbate motions, including translational and rotational motions of adsorbate patches and multilayer exchanges, that give rise to $1/\omega$ scaling at the MHz frequencies typically employed in ion traps. These results demonstrate that multi-adsorbate systems, even simple ones, can give rise to a set of activated motions that can produce the $1/\omega$ noise observed in ion traps and that collective, rather than individual, adsorbate motions are much more likely to give rise to low-frequency heating.