MANIPULATION OF THE QUANTUM MOTION OF TRAPPED ATOMIC IONS VIA STIMULATED RAMAN TRANSITIONS

Abstract

Trapped ions have been a staple resource of quantum simulation for the past

decade. By taking advantage of the spin motion coupling provided by the Coulomb

interaction, trapped ions have been used to study quantum phase transitions of

highly frustrated spins, many body localization, as well as discrete time crystals.

However, all of these simulations involve decoupling the ion motion from spin at

the end of the experimental procedure. Here we present progress towards driving

bosonic interference between occupied phonon modes.

This thesis details a tool box for manipulating the motional states of a chain

of trapped ions. Taking advantage of spin motion interaction of tightly trapped

chains of 171Yb+ ions with two photon Raman transition, we show how to prepare

a specic number state of a given normal mode of motion. This is achieved without

traditional individual addressing but instead by using composite pulse sequences

and ion transport. This involves a stage of quantum state distillation, and we also

show preservation of phonon and spin coherence after this distillation step. This

Fock state preparation sets the stage to observe bosonic interference of different

phonon modes.

We use stimulated Raman transitions to create a parametric drive; this drive

will couple different normal modes of motion. To observe the bosonic nature of the

phonons, we preform a Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference experiment on two

singly occupied normal modes. We use the same spin motion coupling to read out

the spin states of individual ions as a witness for this interaction. We also describe

a process to use stimulated rapid adiabatic passage (STIRAP) to read out normal

mode occupation. The toolbox presented here will be useful for future experiments

towards boson sampling using trapped ions.