Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 252-274).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 376).

This thesis reports high-fidelity near-field spatial microwave addressing of long-lived ⁴³Ca⁺ "atomic clock" qubits performed in a two-zone single-layer surface-electrode ion trap. Addressing is implemented by using two of the trap's integrated microwave electrodes, one in each zone, to drive single-qubit rotations in the zone we choose to address whilst interferometrically cancelling the microwave field at the neighbour (non-addressed) zone. Using this field-nulling scheme, we measure a Rabi frequency ratio between addressed and non-addressed zones of up to 1400, from which we calculate an addressing error (or a spin-flip probability on the qubit transition) of 1e-6. Off-resonant excitation out of the qubit state is a more significant source of error in this experiment, but we also demonstrate polarisation control of the microwave field at an error level of 2e-5, which, if combined with individual-ion addressing, would be sufficient to suppress off-resonant excitation errors to the 1e-9 level. Further, this thesis presents preliminary results obtained with a micron-scale coupled-microstrip differential antenna probe that can be scanned over an ion-trap chip to map microwave magnetic near fields. The probe is designed to enable the measurement of fields at tens of microns above electrode surfaces and to act as an effective characterisation tool, speeding up design-fabrication-characterisation cycles in the production of new prototype microwave ion-trap chips. Finally, a new multi-layer design for an ion-trap chip which displays, in simulations, a 100-fold improvement in addressing performance, is presented. The chip electrode structure is designed to use the cancelling effect of microwave return currents to produce Rabi frequency ratios of order 1000 between trap zones using a single microwave electrode (i.e. without the need for nulling fields). If realised, this chip could be used to drive individually addressed single-qubit operations on arrays of memory qubits in parallel and with high fidelity.

As ligações entre a termodinâmica e a mecânica quântica mostram-se interessantes tópicos de pesquisa desde os anos 50 e tem atraído cada vez mais atenção nos últimos anos, tanto por suas possíveis aplicações tecnológicas, quanto pelo aspecto teórico - como, por exemplo, as relações de sistemas quânticos com a segunda lei da termodinâmica. Para sistemas quânticos mesoscópicos, restritos apenas a um número relativamente pequeno de estados energéticos, torna-se necessária uma generalização da termodinâmica usual. Neste trabalho mostramos como construir uma máquina de Stirling no contexto de íons aprisionados. Para isso, faz-se necessária a engenharia de frequências dependentes do tempo do modo vibracional do íon, além da engenharia de reservatórios térmicos com temperaturas controladas. Após a construção da máquina de Stirling e do cálculo do trabalho e da eficiência associados apresentamos um protocolo para a medida da função de distribuição do trabalho que recorre às medidas dos níveis de energia eletrônicos do íon para, a partir dessas, extrair-se informação sobre o seu estado vibracional. / The connections between quantum mechanics and thermodynamics have been an interesting research topic since the 1950´s and began attracting more and more attention recently, not only for the technological applications, but also from a theoretical point of view - as, for instance, when dealing with the relations between quantum systems and the second law of thermodynamics. For mesoscopic (or even macroscopic) quantum systems, restricted to relatively few energy states, a generalization of the usual thermodynamics becomes necessary. In the present work we show how to engeneer a Stirling engine in an ionic trap. To achieve this we have to engeneer an ionic vibrational mode with a time dependent frequency, and simutaneously engeneer a thermal reservoir with controled temperatures. After the construction of the Stirling machine and the calculation of the associated work and efficiency, we show a protocol that allows the measurement of the work distribution function which call on the measurement of the electronic energy levels of the ion and, from them, extract information about the vibrational state of the trap.

Comparisons between measurements of the ground-state hyperfine structure and gravitational acceleration of hydrogen and antihydrogen could provide a test of fundamental physical theories such as CPT (charge conjugation, parity, time-reversal) and gravitational symmetries. Currently, antihydrogen traps are based on Malmberg-Penning traps. The number of antiprotons in Malmberg-Penning traps with sufficiently low energy to be suitable for trappable antihydrogen production may be reduced by the electrostatic space charge of the positrons and/or collisions among antiprotons. Alternative trap designs may be needed for future antihydrogen experiments. A computational tool is developed to simulate charged particle motion in customizable magnetic fields generated by combinations of current loops and current lines. The tool is used to examine charged particle confinement in two systems consisting of dual, levitated current loops. The loops are coaxial and arranged to produce a magnetic null curve. Conditions leading to confinement in the system are quantified and confinement modes near the null curve and encircling one or both loops are identified. Furthermore, the tool is used to examine and quantify charged particle motion parallel to the null curve in the large radius limit of the dual, levitated current loops. An alternative to new trap designs is to identify the effects of the positron space in existing traps and to find modes of operation where the space charge is beneficial. Techniques are developed to apply the Boltzmann density relation along curved magnetic field lines. Equilibrium electrostatic potential profiles for a positron plasma are computed by solving Poisson's equation using a finite-difference method. Equilibria are computed in a model Penning trap with an axially varying magnetic field. Also, equilibria are computed for a positron plasma in a model of the ALPHA trap. Electric potential wells are found to form self-consistently. The technique is expanded to compute equilibria for a two-species plasma with an antiproton plasma confined by the positron space charge. The two-species equilibria are used to estimate timescales associated with three-body recombination, losses due to collisions between antiprotons, and temperature equilibration. An equilibrium where the three-body recombination rate is the smallest is identified.

The objective of this research is to design, fabricate, and demonstrate a microfabricated monolithic ion trap for applications in quantum computation and quantum simulation. Most current microfabricated ion trap designs are based on planar-segmented surface electrodes. Although promising scalability to trap arrays containing ten to one hundred ions, these planar designs suffer from the challenges of shallow trap depths, radial asymmetry of the confining potential, and electrode charging resulting from laser interactions with dielectric surfaces. In this research, the design, fabrication, and testing of a monolithic and symmetric two-level ion trap is presented. This ion trap overcomes the challenges of surface-electrode ion traps. Numerical electrostatic simulations show that this symmetric trap produces a deep (1 eV for 171Yb+ ion), radially symmetric RF confinement potential. The trap has an angled through-chip slot that allows back-side ion loading and generous through laser access, while avoiding surface-light scattering and dielectric charging that can corrupt the design control electrode compensating potentials. The geometry of the trap and its dimensions are optimized for trapping long and linear ion chains with equal spacing for use with quantum simulation problems and quantum computation architectures.

Laser-cooled atomic ions have led to an unprecedented amount of control over the quantum states of matter. The Coulombic interaction allows for information to be transferred between neighboring ions, and this interaction can be used to entangle qubits for logic operations in quantum information processors. The same procedure for logic operations can be used for high resolution atomic spectroscopy, and is the basis for the most accurate atomic optical clocks to date. This thesis describes how laser-cooled atomic ions can impact physical chemistry through the development of molecular ion spectroscopy techniques and the simulation of magnetic systems by ion trap quantum computers. A new technique developed for spectroscopy, Sympathetic Heating Spectroscopy (SHS), takes advantage of the Coulombic interaction between two trapped ions: the control ion and a spectroscopy ion. SHS uses the back action of the interrogating laser to map spectroscopy ion information onto the Doppler shift of the control ion for measurement. SHS only requires Doppler cooling of the ions and fluorescence measurement and represents a simplification of quantum logic spectroscopy. This technique is demonstrated on two individual isotopes of calcium: Ca-40(+) for cooling and Ca-44(+) as the spectroscopy ion. Having demonstrated SHS with atomic ions, the next step was to extend the technique by loading and characterizing molecular ions. The identification of an unknown molecular ion is necessary and can be achieved by monitoring the change in motion of the two ion crystal, which is dependent on the molecular ion mass. The motion of two trapped ions is described by their normal modes, which can be accurately measured by performing resolved sideband spectroscopy of the S(1/2)-D(5/2) transition of calcium. The resolved sidebands can be used to identify unknown ions (atomic and molecular) by calculating the mass based on the observed value in axial normal mode frequencies. Again, the trapped molecular ion is sympathetically cooled via the Coulombic interaction between the Ca-40(+) and the unknown molecular ion. The sensitivity of SHS could be improved by implementing sympathetic sideband cooling and determining the heating by measuring single quanta of motion. The ultimate limit of control would be the development of an ion trap quantum computer. Many theoretical quantum computing researchers have made bold claims of the exponential improvement a quantum computer would have over a classical computer for the simulation of physical systems such as molecules. These claims are true in principle for ideal systems, but given non-ideal components it is necessary to consider the scaling due to error correction. An estimate of the resource requirements, the total number of physical qubits and computational time, required to compute the ground state energy of a 1-D quantum Transverse Ising Model (TIM) of N spin-1/2 particles, as a function of the system size and the numerical precision, is presented. This estimate is based on analyzing the impact of fault-tolerant quantum error correction in the context of the quantum logic array architecture. The results show that a significant amount of error correction is required to implement the TIM problem due to the exponential scaling of the computational time with the desired precision of the energy. Comparison of this result to the resource requirements for a fault-tolerant implementation of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm reveals that the required logical qubit reliability is similar for both the TIM problem and the factoring problem.

Ion traps are an incredibly versatile tool which have many applications throughout the physical sciences, including such diverse topics as mass spectrometry, precision frequency metrology, tests of fundamental physics, and quantum computing. In this thesis, experiments are presented which involve trapping and measuring properties of Th³⁺. Th³⁺ ions are of unique interest in part because they are a promising platform for studying an unusually low-lying nuclear transition in the 229Th nucleus which could eventually be used as an exceptional optical clock. Here, experiments to measure electronic lifetimes of Th³⁺ are described. A second experimental topic explores the production of sympathetically cooled molecular ions. The study of cold molecular ions has a number of applications, some of which include spectroscopy to aid the study of astrophysical objects, precision tests of quantum electrodynamics predictions, and the study of chemical reactions in the quantum regime. The experiments presented here involve the production of barium monohalide ions, BaX⁺ (X = F, Cl, Br). This type of molecular ion proves to be particularly promising for cooling to the rovibrational ground state. The method used for producing BaX⁺ ions involves reactions between cold, trapped Ba⁺ ions and neutral gas phase reactants at room temperature. The Ba⁺ ion reaction experiments presented in this thesis characterize these reactions for producing Coulomb crystals composed of laser cooled Ba⁺ ions and sympathetically cooled BaX⁺ ions.

Orientador: Prof. Dr. Fernando Luis da Silva Semião / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal do ABC, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Física, 2018.

Orientador: Antonio Vidiella Barranco / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Fisica "Gleb Wataghin" / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-06T16:53:55Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Silva_FernandoLuisSemiaoda_D.pdf: 1615501 bytes, checksum: 370145b0056b0b8da7cf94fb9d01bc25 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / Resumo: A presente tese é dedicada à utilização de conhecidos sistemas quânticos em aplicações de interesse em óptica e informação quântica. Motivados pelos recentes avanços experimentais em sistemas formados por íons aprisionados interagindo com lasers e na eletrodinâmica quântica de cavidades, nós focamos grande parte de nossas propostas nestes sistemas. Mais especificamente, nós estudamos a interação de íons e campos quantizados na chamada eletrodinâmica quântica de cavidades com íons aprisionados. Neste contexto, iniciamos nossos trabalhos com uma proposta de geração de superposições mesoscópicas no movimento do íon. Uma vez que tais superposições são muito sensíveis à decoerência, incluímos perdas na cavidade para tratar uma situação mais realista. Através da observação de quantum jumps, ou fóton-contagens fora da cavidade, mostramos um esquema de geração de estados com características quânticas muito similares aos encontrados no caso da cavidade ideal, sem perdas. Neste aspecto, encontramos um modo de usar a dissipação a nosso favor, fato de grande interesse experimental devido às imperfeições dos espelhos reais. Apresentamos também uma proposta de implementação de uma interação do tipo Kerr em íons como uma alternativa ao uso de cristais não-lineares que apresentam baixíssima eficiência para esse tipo de efeito. Essa proposta abre novas possibilidades para o uso de íons em medidas não demolidoras e computação quântica. Nossos estudos na área de eletrodinâmica quântica com íons aprisionados terminam com a análise dos efeitos do movimento do íon na dinâmica das transições multi-fotônicas. Esse é um estudo mais fundamental e está relacionado com o entendimento da interação da radiação com a matéria. Na última parte desta tese são apresentados resultados sobre o uso de sistemas de muitos corpos para a distribuição de informação quântica. O objetivo de se estudar estes sistemas mais complexos é a busca de implementação de protocolos quânticos em larga escala. Neste sentido, poderíamos pensar numa cadeia de osciladores harmônicos acoplados como ocorre em sistemas típicos da física da matéria condensada. Em particular, nós estudamos como aumentar a eficiência na transmissão de emaranhamento nestas cadeias. Propusemos um esquema que funciona como um tipo de quantum data bus, ou ônibus quântico para transportar e distribuir emaranhamento com alta eficiência / Abstract: This thesis is concerned with the use of firmly established quantum systems for applications in quantum optics and quantum information. Having been driven by recent experimental advances in laser-manipulated trapped ions and cavity quantum electrodynamics, we concentrated more on proposals to be implemented in those systems. Being more specific, we have studied the interaction between trapped ions and quantized fields in the so-called cavity quantum electrodynamics with trapped ions. In this context, we began with a proposal to generate mesoscopic superpositions in the motion of the ion. Since these superpositions are extremely sensitive to decoherence, we have included cavity losses in order to make the situation slightly more realistic. We showed that the observation of quantum jumps, or photon detection outside the cavity, would generate quantum states with properties close to that generated in the ideal lossless case. In spite of the normally destructive effect of dissipation, we found a way to use it in our favor which turns out to be of great experimental importance due to always present mirror imperfections. We also showed how to mimic cross-Kerr nonlinearities in the cavity-ion system as a feasible alternative to the use of nonlinear crystals whose intensity of that non-linearity is too weak. This proposal opens up new possibilities for the use of trapped ions in non-demolition measurements and quantum computing. We finish our work in cavity electrodynamics with trapped ions with the study of the effect of the ionic motion on the dynamics of multiphotonic transitions. This is a more fundamental issue that is related to the understanding of matter-field interaction. In the last part of this thesis, we present results on the use of many-body systems for quantum information distribution. It was our goal to study more complex systems for the implementation of quantum protocols in large scale. In this sense, one could think of a chain of coupled harmonic oscillators as commonly found in condensed matter physics. Particularly, we dealt with the efficiency of entanglement transmission through the chain, trying to improve it. We ended up with a scheme which acts as a quantum data bus able to transport and distribute entanglement around quite efficiently / Doutorado / Física / Doutor em Ciências