RydIons · Coherent manipulation of cold trapped ions in Rydberg states
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-04-01 → 2020-03-31
- EU contribution
- €159,461
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Coherent manipulation of cold trapped ions in Rydberg states
Over the past three decades, many efforts have been invested in investigating various quantum systems that can precisely be controlled and form a reliable platform for quantum simulation and computing. Advancements in ultra-cold atoms and ions have revealed their major advantages and make them one of the most promising candidates. Two pillars are important for this success; unprecedented control over the external and internal degrees of freedom of individual ions in traps and the ability to precisely manipulate collective behaviour mediated via long-range interactions between them. The former has been achieved with the highest fidelities in trapped ions and the latter has found the most successful realisations in ultra-cold atoms in highly-excited electronic states, called Rydberg states. In the proposed research, we envisioned a quantum simulator based on Rydberg enhanced interactions between trapped ions, in which these two remarkable properties are combined. The objectives include coherent spectroscopy of Rydberg states of singly-charged atoms confined in an ion trap. Rydberg states are excited using vacuum ultra-violet (VUV) or ultra-violet (UV) laser systems in single- or two-photon excitation processes. Such excitation allows for quantum state-dependent interactions between ions. A remarkable feature of the system is that external electric or magnetic forces yield state-dependent effects that can be measured using spectroscopy techniques. This offers a powerful tool for generating entanglement. Today quantum computation with trapped ions has largely focused on scalability as a major challenge and thus the quest is to implement much faster quantum gate operations. Rydberg trapped ions show great potential to fill this gap and to enable exploration of many-body quantum systems in a precise fashion. This research is part of the worldwide endeavour that aims at exploring quantum effects which can be used to improve or to revolutionise current technologies in simulation, computing and sensing.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The project aims at developing a full coherent control of cold, trapped ions excited to Rydberg states. The experiment will be implemented using laser-cooled atomic ions at microkelvin temperatures in a microfabricated radiofrequency ion trap. The superb control over internal and external degrees of freedom in cold ions will be combined with the high flexibility offered by the Rydberg interaction that enables accurately tuning the strength as well as the angular dependence of the interaction. Building on this control, the researcher will investigate fundamental physics in long-range interactions between such highly controllable quantum systems. New techniques will be developed to generate quantum states that are independent from the trapping field using specific dressed states in a microwave field as well as a fast switching electric field. This will enable the excitation to high-laying Rydberg states, and thus the observation of new quantum effects, i.e., the Rydberg blockade effect in cold ions. Furthermore, coherent excitation of these quantum systems will be achieved based on a two-photon excitation scheme, while the focus will be on experiment with multi ions in linear as well as two-dimensional arrays. The project will establish a novel approach for understanding the physics of strongly correlated many-body systems. Therefore, the proposed research will pave the way for the implementation of quantum simulators based on fast switchable Rydberg ions as well as for the exploration of the underlying mechanism of symmetry-breaking defect formations. This quantum technology has the potential application for simulating the transport of vibrational excitations along protein chains.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- JOHANNES GUTENBERG-UNIVERSITAT MAINZ · MainzCoordinatorGermany
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union