Ultrafast Coherent Excitation of an Ytterbium Ion with Single Laser Pulses

We demonstrate coherent excitation of a
¹⁷¹
Yb
⁺
ion using a single near-resonant picosecond ultrafast pulses with maximum population transfer of 94(1)%. This is an important requirement for sub-microsecond fast quantum logic gate with trapped-ion qubits.