Controlling Fast Transport of Cold Trapped Ions

We realize fast transport of ions in a segmented microstructured Paul trap. The ion is shuttled over a distance of more than 10⁴ times its ground state wave function size during only five motional cycles of the trap (280μm in 3.6μs). Starting from a ground-state-cooled ion, we find an optimized transport such that the energy increase is as low as 0.10±0.01 motional quanta. In addition, we demonstrate that quantum information stored in a spin-motion entangled state is preserved throughout the transport. Shuttling operations are concatenated, as a proof-of-principle for the shuttling-based architecture to scalable ion trap quantum computing.