No Arabic abstract
Following a recent proposal of L. Wang and D. Babikov, J. Chem. Phys. 137, 064301 (2012), we theoretically illustrate the possibility of using the motional states of a $Cd^+$ ion trapped in a slightly anharmonic potential to simulate the single-particle time-dependent Schrodinger equation. The simulated wave packet is discretized on a spatial grid and the grid points are mapped on the ion motional states which define the qubit network. The localization probability at each grid point is obtained from the population in the corresponding motional state. The quantum gate is the elementary evolution operator corresponding to the time-dependent Schrodinger equation of the simulated system. The corresponding matrix can be estimated by any numerical algorithm. The radio-frequency field able to drive this unitary transformation among the qubit states of the ion is obtained by multi-target optimal control theory. The ion is assumed to be cooled in the ground motional state and the preliminary step consists in initializing the qubits with the amplitudes of the initial simulated wave packet. The time evolution of the localization probability at the grids points is then obtained by successive applications of the gate and reading out the motional state population. The gate field is always identical for a given simulated potential, only the field preparing the initial wave packet has to be optimized for different simulations. We check the stability of the simulation against decoherence due to fluctuating electric fields in the trap electrodes by applying dissipative Lindblad dynamics.
We propose an experiment in which the phonon excitation of ion(s) in a trap, with a trap frequency exponentially modulated at rate $kappa$, exhibits a thermal spectrum with an Unruh temperature given by T=hbar*kappa. We discuss the similarities of this experiment to the usual Unruh effect for quantum fields and uniformly accelerated detectors. We demonstrate a new Unruh effect for detectors that respond to anti-normally ordered moments using the ions first blue sideband transition.
We demonstrate a method of exploring the quantum critical point of the Ising universality class using unitary maps that have recently been demonstrated in ion trap quantum gates. We reverse the idea with which Feynman conceived quantum computing, and ask whether a realisable simulation corresponds to a physical system. We proceed to show that a specific simulation (a unitary map) is physically equivalent to a Hamiltonian that belongs to the same universality class as the transverse Ising Hamiltonian. We present experimental signatures, and numerical simulation for these in the six-qubit case.
Iterated dynamical maps offer an ideal setting to investigate quantum dynamical bifurcations and are well adapted to few-qubit quantum computer realisations. We show that a single trapped ion, subject to periodic impulsive forces, exhibits a rich structure of dynamical bifurcations derived from the Jahn-Teller Hamiltonian flow model. We show that the entanglement between the oscillator and electronic degrees of freedom reflects the underlying dynamical bifurcation in a Floquet eigenstate.
We show how entangled qubits can be encoded as entangled coherent states of two-dimensional centre-of-mass vibrational motion for two ions in an ion trap. The entangled qubit state is equivalent to the canonical Bell state, and we introduce a proposal for entanglement transfer from the two vibrational modes to the electronic states of the two ions in order for the Bell state to be detected by resonance fluorescence shelving methods.
Anomalous heating of trapped atomic ions is a major obstacle to their use as quantum bits in a scalable quantum computer. The physical origin of this heating is not fully understood, but experimental evidence suggests that it is caused by electric-field noise emanating from the surface of the trap electrodes. In this study, we have investigated the role that adsorbates on the electrodes play by identifying contaminant overlayers, developing an in situ argon-ion beam cleaning procedure, and measuring ion heating rates before and after cleaning the trap electrodes surfaces. We find a reduction of two orders of magnitude in heating rate after cleaning.