Nature Communications

Chip scale coil stabilized Brillouin laser driving a room temperature trapped ion qubit

2026-03-03

Photonic integrated stable, ultra-low-noise lasers are essential for scalable and portable quantum information systems. Trapped ions are a leading modality for quantum computing and optical clocks, with room-temperature operation enabling portable applications. Current systems rely on free-space lasers and stabilization cavities, frequency conversion, and cryogenic infrastructure, limiting size, weight, and power. We demonstrate a chip-scale coil-stabilized 674 nm Brillouin laser driving qubit state preparation and measurement and the optical clock transition in a room-temperature surface electrode trapped 88 Sr + ion without a bulk-optic reference cavity. The CMOS compatible silicon nitride integrated 3-meter coil and Brillouin laser achieve 8.8×10 -13 stability at 20 ms, sufficient to interrogate the 0.4 Hz quadrupole optical clock transition. The ion-disciplined laser achieves 5.3 $$\times {10}^{-13}/\sqrt{\tau }$$ × 10 − 13 / τ stability, spectroscopy with 1.5 kHz linewidths, and 99.6% qubit state preparation and measurement fidelity. These results light the way towards integration of stabilized lasers with trapped-ion chips for portable and robust quantum technologies.

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DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69948-2