Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Sensing near the Heisenberg limit with a trapped-ion mechanical oscillator

Presenting Author: Katherine McCormick, University of Colorado
Contributing Author(s): Jonas Keller, Shaun Burd, David Wineland, Andrew Wilson, Dietrich Leibfried

Developing tools for precisely controlling and measuring the motion of a trapped ion could contribute to several possible applications, such as improving fidelities of quantum computations, opening up new avenues for quantum simulations and using ions as quantum-mechanical sensors in searches for new physics. I will discuss recent work aimed at characterizing and improving the level of motional coherence in trapped-ion systems, and present potential extensions for precision measurement applications. First, I will present results on the generation of oscillator number states up to n = 100 and superpositions of the form |0⟩+|n⟩, with n up to 18. These superposition states are used to measure the motional frequency with a sensitivity that ideally follows the 1/n Heisenberg scaling. Second, we investigate the spectrum of motional frequency noise using a series of coherent displacements of the motion of the ion, with features similar to Ramsey and dynamical decoupling sequences. These techniques, while demonstrated in a trapped-ion system, should be widely adaptable to other quantum-mechanical harmonic oscillators.

Read this article online: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.00668, https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.11934

(Session 10 : Tuesday from 9:45am - 10:15am)