Ion Trap- how it works
Once the charged atoms are trapped inside the chip's vacuumed space, it's impossible to create a trapping force with electrodes at fixed voltages that can hold an ion in a fixed position. That has been tried and didn't work well. These ions can find a way to move around, getaway. Instead, scientists use rapidly oscillating voltages, such that the average field traps the ions in all three dimensions.
As an analogy in the real world, imagine placing a ball on top of a saddle and then spinning the saddle very quickly — it's the same basic idea at a large scale. Once trapped, now we can do gates and make them compute something valuable thanks to supper position features of ions that are now the qubits.
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