Entanglement is an established resource in quantum information processing, and there is a clear imperative to study many-body systems both in quantum technology applications and for probing fundamental physical laws. Ion trap cavity quantum electrodynamics is a highly promising platform for research. Prerequisites are the controlled coupling of many ions to the cavity field along with the ability to initialize the quantum states and drive coherent transitions between them. A coaxial ion trap and high finesse cavity system has been shown to couple strings of up to five ions to the cavity mode with nearly optimal coupling strength thanks to precise control over their positions in the standing wave and their mutual Coulomb interaction. The predictive power of the theoretical model demonstrates that the scheme can be extended to more ions or to higher coupling regimes. In a separate experiment it has been demonstrated that a quantum state can be initialized, before coherently transferring the population to a qubit state through the cavity interaction. The emission of polarized photons in the cavity mode has been measured, taking the system closer to the generation of cluster states for quantum information research and fundamental studies in many-body entanglement. Building on the aforementioned work, an infrastructure has been put in place for the direct observation of vacuum Rabi oscillations between a single ion and the cavity. In this scheme, the contribution to the dynamics from the dominant incoherent channel is minimized through post-selection of the data. As a quantum system coupled to a reservoir with memory, it will provide experimental constraints on theoretical work in the field of non-Markovian dynamics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:714816 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Vogt, Markus O. |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/68376/ |
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