A phonon laser in the quantum regime

Abstract

We demonstrate a trapped-ion system with two competing dissipation channels, implemented independently on two ion species co-trapped in a Paul trap. By controlling coherent spin-oscillator couplings and optical pumping rates we explore the phase diagram of this system, which exhibits a regime analogous to that of a (phonon) laser but operates close to the quantum ground state with an average phonon number of $\bar{n}<10$. We demonstrate phase locking of the oscillator to an additional resonant drive, and also observe the phase diffusion of the resulting state under dissipation by reconstructing the quantum state from a measurement of the characteristic function.