Chris Ballance received an MPhys in Physics from Somerville College, Oxford in 2010. He completed his DPhil at Hertford College, Oxford. In 2015 he joined Magdalen College as a Fellow by Examination. His work focusses on using trapped atomic ions to develop the building blocks of a quantum computer.
This thesis describes experimental work in the field of trapped-ion quantum computation. It outlines the theory of Raman interactions, examines the various sources of error in two-qubit gates, and describes in detail experimental explorations of the sources of infidelity in implementations of single- and two-qubit gates. Lastly, it presents an experimental demonstration of a mixed-species entangling gate.