Modeling near ground-state cooling of two-dimensional ion crystals in a Penning trap using electromagnetically induced transparency

Published

February 7, 2019

Author(s)

Athreya Shankar, Elena Jordan, Kevin Gilmore, Arghavan Safavi-Naini, John J. Bollinger, Murray Holland

Abstract

Penning traps, with their ability to control planar crystals of tens to hundreds of ions, are versatile quantum simulators. Thermal occupations of the motional drumhead modes, transverse to the plane of the ion crystal, degrade the quality of quantum simulations. Laser cooling using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT cooling) is attractive as an efficient way to quickly initialize the drumhead modes to near ground-state occupations. We numerically investigate the efficiency of EIT cooling of planar ion crystals in a Penning trap, accounting for complications arising from the nature of the trap and from the simultaneous cooling of multiple ions. We show that, in spite of challenges, the large bandwidth of drumhead modes (hundreds of kilohertz) can be rapidly cooled to near ground-state occupations within a few hundred microseconds. Our predictions for the center-of-mass mode include a cooling time constant of tens of microseconds and an enhancement of the cooling rate with increasing number of ions. Successful experimental demonstrations of EIT cooling in the NIST Penning trap [Jordan et al., [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 053603 (2019)] validate our predictions.

Citation

Physical Review A

Volume

99

Pub Type

Journals

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DOI Link

Keywords

EIT cooling, Penning traps, sub-Doppler cooling, trapped ions

Citation

Shankar, A. , Jordan, E. , Gilmore, K. , Safavi-Naini, A. , Bollinger, J. and Holland, M. (2019), Modeling near ground-state cooling of two-dimensional ion crystals in a Penning trap using electromagnetically induced transparency, Physical Review A, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.99.023409 (Accessed October 16, 2025)