Indirect Cooling of Weakly Coupled Trapped-Ion Mechanical Oscillators

Published

April 2, 2024

Author(s)

Panyu Hou, Jenny Wu, Stephen Erickson, Giorgio Zarantonello, Adam Brandt, Daniel Cole, Andrew C. Wilson, Daniel Slichter, Dietrich Leibfried

Abstract

Cooling the motion of trapped ions to near the quantum ground state is crucial for many ap- plications in quantum information processing and quantum metrology. However, some motional modes of trapped ions are difficult to cool because they only interact weakly, or not at all, with the radiation used for cooling, typically from laser beams. We overcome these obstacles by coupling a mode with weak or zero cooling radiation interaction to one with strong cooling radiation interaction using parametric modulation of the trapping potential, thereby enabling indirect cooling of the first mode. In this way, we demonstrate near-ground-state cooling of motional modes with weak or zero cooling radiation interaction in two-ion and three-ion crystals of the same and mixed ion species, specifically 9Be+-9Be+, 9Be+-25Mg+, and 9Be+-25Mg+-9Be+ crystals. The approach is generally applicable to any Coulomb crystal where some but not all modes are efficiently cooled, including crystals containing molecular ions, highly-charged ions, charged fundamental particles, or charged macroscopic objects.

Citation

Physical Review X

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.021003

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Keywords

Trapped ions, Ground-state cooling, Coupled harmonic oscillators, Quantum information processing, Quantum Metrology.

Citation

Hou, P. , Wu, J. , Erickson, S. , Zarantonello, G. , Brandt, A. , Cole, D. , Wilson, A. , Slichter, D. and Leibfried, D. (2024), Indirect Cooling of Weakly Coupled Trapped-Ion Mechanical Oscillators, Physical Review X, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.021003, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=936078 (Accessed October 9, 2025)