Description
Speaker:
Prof Kenji Toyoda
Osaka University
Abstract:
Vibrational excitations in trapped ions, or phonons, serve as useful
resources for quantum information processing, including quantum simulation and quantum computing. Localized excitations of the vibrational motion of individual ions (local phonons) offer both large information capacity and straightforward scalability, and can be used to simulate quantum particles propagating in a lattice. Hopping of local phonons, described by a hopping Hamiltonian, is an elementary process in such systems, and the coherence of local-phonon hopping is of central importance for applications based on this mechanism. Here we investigate local-phonon hopping and its coherence in the radial direction of a two-ion crystal. We experimentally observe the decay of phonon hopping as a function of the principal trap parameters and compare the results with numerically simulations. In the simulations we incorporate two main effects: residual thermal motion in the axial direction, which affects the dynamics through the nonlinearity of the Coulomb coupling, and electric-potential noise in the trapping environment. Incorporating these effects enables a quantitative comparison between the experimental observation and the numerical results.