Project A07: Dynamics of ion Coulomb crystals

Introduction

The project A07 focuses on the many-body dynamics of crystalline systems using trapped ions aligned in ion Coulomb crystals (ICC) as its platform. Systems composed of ions trapped in Penning or Paul traps impress with the possibility to manipulate and observe the dynamics of single atoms in crystal structures in situ. When forming ICC below a melting temperature the ions equilibrate at typical distances of tens of microns which enables researchers to resolve the crystal structure at the single particle level as well as the readout and manipulation of their individual motional states. These properties can be exploited to investigate energy transport, dynamics and localization features of quantum many-body systems such as Hubbard-type models.

All these efforts will be combined in the next funding period with a completed experimental setup dedicated to this project. We will implement electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) cooling to reduce thermal fluctuations and therefore improve the accuracy of transport experiments. Moreover, we aim to combine this technique with the creation of polaritonic states emerging via a continuous sideband driving of an electronic transition, the resulting Jaynes-Cummings Hubbard (JCH) model exhibits features as a superfluid-to-Mott insulator transition and holds advantages over other platforms employed for similar studies. Furthermore, we will extend the study of nanofriction and defects in ion crystals to systems with higher dimensionality, i.e. triangular lattices and cigar shaped crystals with different ionic shells. We will study how the introduction of defects and doping with highly charged ions influences the structure of the crystal’s motional modes and therefore the energy transport and stability of the crystal against thermal fluctuations.

This project explores the quantum many-body dynamics of trapped ion crystals in different regimes and tries to answer fundamental questions of crystalline systems with defects, mixed ion species and continuous phase transitions. Furthermore, it aims to harness the dynamical features found in different phases to advance the level of control of trapped ions that is desirable for applications such as optical clocks or quantum information experiments.