Simple Manipulation of a Microwave Dressed-State Ion Qubit

Many schemes for implementing quantum information processing require that the atomic states used have a nonzero magnetic moment; however, such magnetically sensitive states of an atom are vulnerable to decoherence due to fluctuating magnetic fields. Dressing an atom with external fields is a powerful method of reducing such decoherence [N. Timoney et al., Nature (London) 476, 185 (2011)]. We introduce an experimentally simpler method of manipulating such a dressed-state qubit, which allows the implementation of general rotations of the qubit, and demonstrate this method using a trapped ytterbium ion.