Defect generation and dynamics during quenching in finite size homogeneous ion chains

Abstract

An equally spaced linear chain of ions provides a test-bed for studying the defect formation in a finite size 1D system. In particular, defect formation related to topological phase transition from a linear configuration to a zig-zag one is of interest here. A semi-empirical expression provides an excellent agreement to the numerical results. The non-adiabatic transition between the chain and zig-zag topologies for a finite size system of 30 ions shows clear distinction from non-uniformly distributed ion chain. Thus the underlying Homogeneous Kibble-Zurek model can be tested in presently accessible ion trap experiments. Furthermore, our study indicates collective defect behaviour appearing through the correlation length measurements.

References in corpus (4)

• Structural defects in ion crystals by quenching the external potential: the inhomogeneous Kibble-Zurek mechanism
• Structural phase transitions in low-dimensional ion crystals
• Large Scale Quantum Computation in an Anharmonic Linear Ion Trap
• Spontaneous nucleation of structural defects in inhomogeneous ion chains

Cited by in corpus (3)

• The physics and applications of strongly coupled plasmas levitated in electrodynamic traps
• Non-destructive detection of large molecules without mass limitation
• Homogeneous Linear Ion Crystal in a Hybrid Potential