We show that the vibrations of a chain of trapped ions offer an interesting route to explore the physics of disordered quantum systems. By preparing the internal state of the ions in a quantum superposition, we show how the local vibrational energy becomes a stochastic variable, being its statistical properties inherited from the underlying quantum parallelism of the internal state. We describe a minimally-perturbing measurement of the resonance fluorescence, which allows us to study effects like Anderson localization without the need of ground-state cooling or individual addressing, and thus paves the way towards high-temperature ion experiments.
Driving an ion at a motional sideband transition induces the Jaynes--Cummings (JC) interaction. This JC interaction creates an anharmonic ladder of JC eigenstates, resulting in the suppression of phonon hopping due to energy conservation. Here, we realize phonon blockade in the presence of multiple local phonons in a trapped-ion chain. Our work establishes a key technological component for quantum simulation with multiple bosonic particles, which can simulate classically intractable problems.
In this paper, we present a dynamical decoupling (DD) technique to coherently control the dynamics of a single local phonon in trapped ions. A 2$π$ rotation at a motional sideband transition flips the sign of the relevant local phonon state, resulting in cancellation of the phonon dynamics. In this work, we implement DD using single and multiple blue-sideband pulses to control a single local phonon in two $^{40}{\rm Ca}^{+}$ ions in a linear Paul trap. Our proposed DD technique can be used to engineer coupling between local phonon modes.
We propose and demonstrate phonon-number-resolving detection of the multiple local phonon modes in a trapped-ion chain. To mitigate the effect of phonon hopping during the detection process, the probability amplitude of each local phonon mode is mapped to the auxiliary long-lived motional ground states. Sequential state-dependent fluorescence detection is then performed. In the experiment, we have successfully observed the time evolution of two local phonon modes in two ions, including the phonon-number correlation between the two modes.
Study of decoherence in radial local phonon hopping within trapped-ion string
Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University（大阪大学工学研究科）；Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology, Osaka University（大阪大学量子信息与量子生物学中心）
Hybrid quantum-classical matrix-product state and Lanczos methods for electron-phonon systems with strong electronic correlations: Application to disordered systems coupled to Einstein phonons
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen（哥廷根大学）；Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems（马克斯·普朗克复杂系统物理研究所）
Quantum manipulation of individual phonons could offer new resources for studying fundamental physics and creating an innovative platform in quantum information science. Here, we propose to generate quantum states of strongly correlated phonon bundles associated with the motion of a trapped atom. Our scheme operates in the atom-phonon resonance regime where the energy spectrum exhibits strong anharmonicity such that energy eigenstates with different phonon numbers can be well-resolved in the parameter space. Compared to earlier schemes operating in the far dispersive regime, the bundle states …
We compute how phonon creation affects the fidelity of the quantum spin dynamics in trapped ion simulators. A rigorous treatment of the quantum dynamics is made by employing an exact operator factorization of the evolution operator. Although it is often assumed that phonon creation modifies the dynamics of the spin evolution, for an Ising spin-spin interaction in an external magnetic field, phonons have \textit{no effect} on the probabilities of spin product states measured in the direction of the Ising model axis. Phonons play a much more important role in influencing the effective spin dynam…
Propagation and interference of quantum-mechanical particles comprise an important part of elementary processes in quantum physics, and their essence can be modeled using a quantum walk, a mathematical concept that describes the motion of a quantum-mechanical particle among discretized spatial regions. Here we report the observation of the quantum walks of a phonon, a vibrational quantum, in a trapped-ion crystal. By employing the capability of preparing and observing a localized wave packet of a phonon, the propagation of a single radial local phonon in a four-ion linear crystal is observed w…
We show that a trapped ion chain interacting with an optical spin-dependent force shows strong frustration effects due to the interplay between long-range interactions and the dressing by optical phases. We consider a strong spin-phonon coupling regime and predict a quantum phase diagram with different competing magnetic and structural orders. In a highly frustrated region, the system shows enhanced quantum fluctuations and entanglement characteristic of spin-liquid phases. We propose and describe within a mean-field approach a quantum annealing process to induce a quasi-adiabatic evolution to…
We propose a method to manipulate the normal modes in a chain of trapped ions using only two lasers. Linear chains of trapped ions have proven experimentally to be highly controllable quantum systems with a variety of refined techniques for preparation, evolution, and readout, however, typically for quantum information processing applications people have been interested in using the internal levels of the ions as the computational basis. We analyse the case where the motional degrees of freedom of the ions is the quantum system of interest, and where the internal levels are leveraged to facili…
We propose an experimental architecture where an array of optical tweezers affords site-dependent control over the confining potential of a conventional radio-frequency ion trap. The site-dependent control enables programmable manipulation of phonon modes of ions, with many potential applications in quantum information processing (QIP) and thermodynamics. We describe protocols for programming the array of optical tweezers to attain a set of target phonon modes with high accuracy. We propose applications of such controls in simulating quantum thermodynamics of a particle of programmable effecti…
We present a novel system for the simulation of quantum phase transitions of collective internal qubit and phononic states with a linear crystal of trapped ions. The laser-ion interaction creates an energy gap in the excitation spectrum, which induces an effective phonon-phonon repulsion and a Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard interaction. This system shows features equivalent to phase transitions of polaritons in coupled cavity arrays. Trapped ions allow for easy tunabilty of the hopping frequency by adjusting the axial trapping frequency, and the phonon-phonon repulsion via the laser detuning and inte…
We propose a tunable phonon laser prototype with a large trapped ion array, where some of the ions are effectively pinned by optical tweezers, thus isolating a subset of ions that mimics an acoustic cavity used as a phonon lasing resonator. The cavity loss can then be controlled by the tweezer strength and the "wall thickness", the number of pinned ions for isolation. We pump the resonator by applying blue-sideband lasers, and investigate the lasing dynamics of the cavity modes such as threshold behavior, population distribution, the second-order coherence, and line-narrowed spectrum. This sch…
We show that the ramp dynamics of phonons in an one-dimensional ion trap can be used for both generating multi-particle entangled states and motional state cooling of a string of trapped ions. We study such ramp dynamics using an effective Bose-Hubbard model which describes these phonons at low energies and show that specific protocols, involving site-specific dynamical tuning of the on-site potential of the model, can be used to generate entangled states and to achieve motional state cooling without involving electronic states of the ions. We compare and contrast our schemes for these to the …
Phonon trapping has an immense impact in many areas of science and technology, from the antennas of interferometric gravitational wave detectors to chip-scale quantum micro- and nano-mechanical oscillators. It usually relies on the mechanical suspension--an approach, while isolating selected vibrational modes, leads to serious drawbacks for interrogation of the trapped phonons, including limited heat capacity and excess noises via measurements. To circumvent these constraints, we realize a new paradigm of phonon trapping using mechanical bound states in the continuum (BICs) with topological fe…
Trapped ions offer a pristine platform for quantum computation and simulation, but improving their coherence remains a crucial challenge. Here, we propose and analyze a new strategy to enhance the coherent interactions in trapped ion systems via parametric amplification of the ions' motion--by squeezing the collective motional modes (phonons), the spin-spin interactions they mediate can be significantly enhanced. We illustrate the power of this approach by showing how it can enhance collective spin states useful for quantum metrology, and how it can improve the speed and fidelity of two-qubit …
The interaction between the electric dipole moment of a trapped molecular ion and the configuration of the confined Coulomb crystal couples the orientation of the molecule to its motion. We consider the practical feasibility of harnessing this interaction to initialize, process, and read out quantum information encoded in molecular ion qubits without optically illuminating the molecules. We present two schemes wherein a molecular ion can be entangled with a co-trapped atomic ion qubit, providing, among other things, a means for molecular state preparation and measurement. We also show that vir…
Two-photon processes have so far been considered only as resulting from frequency-matched second-order expansions of light-matter interaction, with consequently small coupling strengths. However, a variety of novel physical phenomena arises when such coupling values become comparable with the system characteristic frequencies. Here, we propose a realistic implementation of two-photon quantum Rabi and Dicke models in trapped-ion technologies. In this case, effective two-phonon processes can be explored in all relevant parameter regimes. In particular, we show that an ion chain under bichromatic…
Linear Paul traps have been used recently to simulate the transverse field Ising model with long-range spin-spin couplings. We study the intrinsic effects of phonon creation (from the initial phonon ground state) on the spin-state probability and spin entanglement for such quantum spin simulators. While it has often been assumed that phonon effects are benign because they play no role in the pure Ising model, they can play a significant role when a transverse field is added to the model. We use a many-body factorization of the quantum time-evolution operator of the system, adiabatic perturbati…
We theoretically investigate the possibility of creating phonon-mediated spin-spin interactions between neutral atoms trapped in optical tweezers. By laser coupling the atoms to Rydberg states, collective modes of motion appear. We show that these can be used to mediate effective spin-spin interactions or quantum logic gates between the atoms in analogy to schemes employed in trapped ions. In particular, we employ Rydberg dressing in a novel scheme to induce the needed interaction, and we show that it is possible to replicate the working of the Mølmer-Sørensen entanglement scheme. The Mølmer-S…
We develop a theory to address the non-equilibrium dynamics of phonons in a one-dimensional trapped ion system. We elaborate our earlier results obtained in Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 111}, 170406 (2013) to chart out the mechanism of dynamics-induced cooling and entanglement generation between phonons in these systems when subjected to a linear ramp protocol inducing site-specific tuning of on-site interactions between the phonons. We further extend these studies to non-linear ramps and periodic drive protocols and identify the optimal ramp protocol for minimal cooling and entanglement generation t…
We study analytically and numerically the properties of phonon modes in an ion quantum computer. The ion chain is placed in a harmonic trap with an additional periodic potential which dimensionless amplitude $K$ determines three main phases available for quantum computations: at zero $K$ we have the case of Cirac-Zoller quantum computer, below a certain critical amplitude $K<K_c$ the ions are in the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) phase, with delocalized phonon modes and free chain sliding, and above the critical amplitude $K>K_c$ ions are in the pinned Aubry phase with a finite frequency gap pr…
Quantum theory for phonon lasing and non-classical state generation in mixed-species and single trapped ions
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Institute for Quantum Electronics, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院量子电子学研究所）；Quantum Center, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院量子中心）；Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI)（保罗谢尔研究所）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF（弗劳恩霍夫应用固体物理研究所）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
This work presents some peculiarities of the near quantum ground state behaviour of curved (phonon trapping) Bulk Acoustic Wave (BAW) cavities when compared to a conventional mechanical resonator. The curved cavity system resolves the quandary of the conventional mechanical system where the Bose-Einstein distribution requires higher frequencies for lower quantum occupation factors contrary to the constraint of an inverse frequency dependence of the quantum fluctuations of displacement. We demonstrate how the non-trivial cavity geometry can lead to better phonon trapping, enhancing the variance…
The transport of sound and heat, in the form of phonons, can be limited by disorder-induced scattering. In electronic and optical settings the introduction of chiral transport, in which carrier propagation exhibits parity asymmetry, can remove elastic backscattering and provides robustness against disorder. However, suppression of disorder-induced scattering has never been demonstrated in non-topological phononic systems. Here we experimentally demonstrate a path for achieving robust phonon transport in the presence of material disorder, by explicitly inducing chirality through parity-selectiv…
In this paper we propose a scheme to model the phonon analog of optical elements, including a polarizing beam splitter, a half- wave plate, and a quarter- wave plate, as well as an implementation of CNOT and Pauli gates, by using two atoms confined in a 2D plane. The internal states of the atoms are taken to be Rydberg circular states. Using this model we can manipulate the motional state of the atom, with possible applications in optomechanical integrated circuits for quantum information processing and quantum simulation. Towards this aim, we study the interaction of two trapped atoms with tw…
We propose a concrete experiment to probe the non-equilibrium local dynamics of the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model using a trapped ion system consisting of a linear chain of few Ba^+ ions prepared in a state of transverse motional mode which corresponds to a fixed number of phonons per ion. These phonons are well-known to be described by an effective Bose-Hubbard model. We propose a protocol which leads to a sudden local sign reversal of the on-site interaction strength of this Hubbard model at one of the sites and demonstrate that the subsequent non-equilibrium dynamics of the model can b…
We propose a protocol for measurement of the phonon number distribution of a harmonic oscillator based on selective mapping to a discrete spin-1/2 degree of freedom. We consider a system of a harmonically trapped ion, where a transition between two long lived states can be driven with resolved motional sidebands. The required unitary transforms are generated by amplitude-modulated polychromatic radiation fields, where the time-domain ramps are obtained from numerical optimization by application of the Chopped RAndom Basis (CRAB) algorithm. We provide a detailed analysis of the scaling behavior…
We generalize the analysis of the normal modes for a rotating ionic Coulomb crystal in a Penning trap to allow for inhomogeneities in the system. Our formal developments are completely general, but we choose to examine a crystal of Be+ ions with BeH+ defects to compare with current experimental efforts. We examine the classical phonon modes (both transverse and planar) and we determine the effective spin-spin interactions when the system is driven by an axial spin-dependent optical dipole force. We examine situations with up to approximately 15% defects. We find that most properties are not st…
Time Crystal in the Nonlinear Phonon Mode of the Trapped Ions
Key Laboratory of Materials Physics, Ministry of Education, School of Physics and Laboratory of Zhongyuan Light, Zhengzhou University（郑州大学物理学院、中原之光实验室、教育部材料物理重点实验室）；Institute of Quantum Materials and Physics, Henan Academy of Sciences（河南省科学院量子物质与物理研究所）
We present a self-contained operator-based approach to derive the spectrum of trapped ions. This approach provides the complete normal form of the low energy quadratic Hamiltonian in terms of bosonic phonons, as well as an effective free particle degree of freedom for each spontaneously broken spatial symmetry. We demonstrate how this formalism can directly be used to characterize an ion chain both in the linear and the zigzag regimes. In particular we compute, both for the ground state and finite temperature states, spatial correlations, heat capacity and dynamical susceptibility. Last, for t…
In trapped-ion quantum information processing, interactions between spins (qubits) are mediated by collective modes of motion of an ion crystal. While there are many different experimental strategies to design such interactions, they all face both technical and fundamental limitations to the achievable coherent interaction strength. In general, obtaining strong interactions and fast gates is an ongoing challenge. Here, we extend previous work [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 030501 (2019)] and present a general strategy for enhancing the interaction strengths in trapped-ion systems via parametric amplif…
We investigate quantum synchronization theoretically in a system consisting of two cold ions in microtraps. The ions' motion is damped by a standing-wave laser whilst also being driven by a blue-detuned laser which results in self-oscillation. Working in a non-classical regime, where these oscillations contain only a few phonons and have a sub-Poissonian number variance, we explore how synchronization occurs when the two ions are weakly coupled using a probability distribution for the relative phase. We show that strong correlations arise between the spin and vibrational degrees of freedom wit…
The local phonon modes in a Coulomb crystal of trapped ions can represent a Hubbard system of coupled bosons. We selectively prepare single excitations at each site and observe free hopping of a boson between sites, mediated by the long-range Coulomb interaction between ions. We then implement phonon blockades on targeted sites by driving a Jaynes-Cummings interaction on individually addressed ions to couple their internal spin to the local phonon mode. The resulting dressed states have energy splittings that can be tuned to suppress phonon hopping into the site. This new experimental approach…
We derive the normal modes for a rotating Coulomb ion crystal in a Penning trap, quantize the motional degrees of freedom, and illustrate how they can by driven by a spin-dependent optical dipole force to create a quantum spin simulator on a triangular lattice with hundreds of spins. The analysis for the axial modes (oscillations perpendicular to the two-dimensional crystal plane) follow a standard normal-mode analysis, while the remaining planar modes are more complicated to analyze because they have velocity-dependent forces in the rotating frame. After quantizing the normal modes into phono…
Qubits of long coherence time and fast quantum operations are long-sought objectives towards the realization of high-fidelity quantum operations and their applications to the quantum technologies. An electron levitated in a vacuum by a Paul trap is expected to be a good candidate, for its light mass and hence the high secular frequency which allows for the faster gate operations than those in trapped ions. Controlling the motional state of the trapped electron is a crucial issue, for it mediates an interaction between electron spins, intrinsic qubits embedded in electrons, and its decoherence …
We propose and analyze a scheme to observe topological phenomena with ions in microtraps. We consider a set of trapped ions forming a regular structure in two spatial dimensions and interacting with lasers. We find phonon bands with non-trivial topological properties, which are caused by the breaking of time reversal symmetry induced by the lasers. We investigate the appearance of edge modes, as well as their robustness against perturbations. Long-range hopping of phonons caused by the Coulomb interaction gives rise to flat bands which, together with induced phonon-phonon interactions, can be …
The Coulomb repulsion between ions in a linear Paul trap give rise to anharmonic terms in the potential energy when expanded about the equilibrium positions. We examine the effect of these anharmonic terms on the accuracy of a quantum simulator made from trapped ions. To be concrete, we consider a linear chain of $\text{Yb}^{171+}$ ions stabilized close to the zigzag transition. We find that for typical experimental temperatures, frequencies change by no more than a factor of $0.01\%$ due to the anharmonic couplings. Furthermore, shifts in the effective spin-spin interactions (driven by a spin…
