Scalable Multispecies Ion Transport in a Grid-Based Surface-Electrode Trap

In this work we address the scalability of transport in trapped ion quantum processors by demonstrating ground state multispecies ion transport throughout a $3 \times 2$ section of a grid-based surface-electrode ion trap. Through a combination of broadcast voltage signals -- the number of which are independent of the size of the grid -- and switching a pair of voltage signals for each site on the grid, we demonstrate two fundamental building blocks for arbitrarily sorting $N$ multispecies ion crystals in an $N = m \times n$ grid-based ion trap. First, we swap the position of a ¹⁷¹Yb-¹³⁸Ba ion crystal between adjacent sites on the grid with less than 0.4 quanta of excitation in the axial in-phase and out-of-phase modes, averaged over multiple sites on the grid. Second, we demonstrate a conditional crystal reorder from ¹⁷¹Yb-¹³⁸Ba to ¹³⁸Ba-¹⁷¹Yb with less than 0.1 quanta of excitation in the axial in-phase and out-of-phase modes. Both operations can be simultaneously and conditionally implemented or not in each zone using a novel transport operation known as center-to-left-right (C2LR). Implications of this architecture for circuit times and the scaling of analog wiring in trapped ion quantum processors are discussed.