A trapped single ion inside a Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

Improved control of the motional and internal quantum states of ultracold neutral atoms and ions has opened intriguing possibilities for quantum simulation and quantum computation. Many-body effects have been explored with hundreds of thousands of quantum-degenerate neutral atoms and coherent light-matter interfaces have been built. Systems of single or a few trapped ions have been used to demonstrate universal quantum computing algorithms and to detect variations of fundamental constants in precision atomic clocks. Until now, atomic quantum gases and single trapped ions have been treated separately in experiments. Here we investigate whether they can be advantageously combined into one hybrid system, by exploring the immersion of a single trapped ion into a Bose-Einstein condensate of neutral atoms. We demonstrate independent control over the two components within the hybrid system, study the fundamental interaction processes and observe sympathetic cooling of the single ion by the condensate. Our experiment calls for further research into the possibility of using this technique for the continuous cooling of quantum computers. We also anticipate that it will lead to explorations of entanglement in hybrid quantum systems and to fundamental studies of the decoherence of a single, locally controlled impurity particle coupled to a quantum environment.

References in corpus (13)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Strong atom-field coupling for Bose-Einstein condensates in an optical cavity on a chip
• Cavity QED with a Bose-Einstein condensate
• Quantum transport through a Tonks-Girardeau gas
• Power-Law Distributions for a Trapped Ion Interacting with a Classical Buffer Gas
• Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to a nanomechanical resonator on an atom chip
• Quantum theory of ultracold atom-ion collisions
• Simplified motional heating rate measurements of trapped ions
• Fluorescence during Doppler cooling of a single trapped atom
• Controlled collisions of a single atom and ion guided by movable trapping potentials
• Scanning tunnelling microscopy for ultracold atoms
• Probing ultra-cold Fermi atoms with a single ion
• Orthogonality Catastrophe in Bose-Einstein Condensates

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Single Ion Quantum Lock-In Amplifier
• Cold heteronuclear atom-ion collisions
• Coherent Interaction of a Single Fermion with a Small Bosonic Field
• Kinetics of a single trapped ion in an ultracold buffer gas
• Sympathetic cooling of the Ba${}^{+}$ ion by collisions with ultracold Rb atoms: theoretical prospects
• Reactive collisions of trapped anions with ultracold atoms
• Single Impurity In Ultracold Fermi Superfluids
• Thermodynamics of the three-dimensional Hubbard model: Implications for cooling cold atomic gases in optical lattices
• Quantum Langevin model for exoergic ion-molecule reactions and inelastic processes
• Optimized magnetic lattices for ultracold atomic ensembles
• NRG for the bosonic single-impurity Anderson model: Dynamics
• Many-Body Physics with Trapped Ions