IonQ Reports Kilohertz Entanglement Between an Ion Qubit and Quantum Memory
Published in Tech News, The Quantum World.
October 10, 2026
IonQ announced on October 9 that a photonic link between a trapped-ion qubit and a solid-state quantum memory generated more than 1,000 entanglement events per second. The supporting research was submitted to arXiv on October 7.
The experiment connected a barium ion to a silicon-vacancy center in a diamond nanophotonic cavity. A photon from the ion was converted in wavelength and encoding, interacted with the cavity, and was detected to herald entanglement between the two systems.
The preprint reports an average Bell-pair generation rate of 1.03 kHz, including conversion losses, and a fidelity of 87.9 percent. Its authors compare that rate with the fastest earlier photonic link between two trapped ions and report a fourfold increase.
The work addresses the challenge of connecting separate quantum processor modules. Approximately one entangled pair per millisecond matches the cycle time of planned trapped-ion processors, according to the authors.
This is a hardware research demonstration reported in a preprint, not evidence of a completed scalable quantum data center or a demonstrated medical application.
Sources: Research preprint, arXiv:2610.10705; IonQ announcement, October 9, 2026.