Generating entanglement by simply cooling a system into a stationary state which is highly entangled has many advantages. Schemes based on this idea are robust against parameter fluctuations, tolerate relatively large spontaneous decay rates, and ach
ieve high fidelities independent of their initial state. A possible implementation of this idea in atom-cavity systems has recently been proposed by Kastoryano et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 090502 (2011)]. Here we propose an improved entanglement cooling scheme for two atoms inside an optical cavity which achieves higher fidelities for comparable single-atom cooperativity parameters C. For example, we predict fidelities above 90% even for C as low as 20 without requiring individual laser addressing and without having to detect photons.
We present a novel system for the simulation of quantum phase transitions of collective internal qubit and phononic states with a linear crystal of trapped ions. The laser-ion interaction creates an energy gap in the excitation spectrum, which induce
s an effective phonon-phonon repulsion and a Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard interaction. This system shows features equivalent to phase transitions of polaritons in coupled cavity arrays. Trapped ions allow for easy tunabilty of the hopping frequency by adjusting the axial trapping frequency, and the phonon-phonon repulsion via the laser detuning and intensity. We propose an experimental protocol to access all observables of the system, which allows one to obtain signatures of the quantum phase transitions even with a small number of ions.
