Coherently displaced oscillator quantum states of a single trapped atom

Abstract

Coherently displaced harmonic oscillator number states of a harmonically bound ion can be coupled to two internal states of the ion by a laser-induced motional sideband interaction. The internal states can subsequently be read out in a projective measurement via state-dependent fluorescence, with near-unit fidelity. This leads to a rich set of line shapes when recording the internal-state excitation probability after a sideband excitation, as a function of the frequency detuning of the displacement drive with respect to the ion's motional frequency. We precisely characterize the coherent displacement based on the resulting line shapes, which exhibit sharp features that are useful for oscillator frequency determination from the single quantum regime up to very large coherent states with average occupation numbers of several hundred. We also introduce a technique based on multiple coherent displacements and free precession for characterizing noise on the trapping potential in the frequency range of 500 Hz to 400 kHz. Signals from the ion are directly used to find and eliminate sources of technical noise in this typically unaccessed part of the spectrum.

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Trapped-Ion Quantum Computing: Progress and Challenges
• Quantum oscillator noise spectroscopy via displaced cat states
• Quantum harmonic oscillator spectrum analyzers
• Mass-selective removal of ions from Paul traps using parametric excitation
• Coherence properties of highly-excited motional states of a trapped ion
• Toward hybrid quantum simulations with qubits and qumodes on trapped-ion platforms
• Excited-state magnetic properties of carbon-like ${\text{Ca}}^{14+}$
• Sub-shot-noise sensitivity via superpositions of two deformed kitten states
• Quantum Rabi interferometry of motion and radiation
• Nonlinear-enhanced wideband sensing via subharmonic excitation of a quantum harmonic oscillator
• Characterization and cancellation of power-line-induced motional-mode frequency noise in a trapped-ion system