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arXiv:1507.02500 · Physical Review A

Dark-state cooling of a trapped ion using microwave coupling

Yong Lu, Jian‐Qi Zhang, Jin‐Ming Cui, Dong-Yang Cao, Shuo Zhang, Yun‐Feng Huang, Chuan‐Feng Li, Guang‐Can Guo

Published Aug 21, 2015• 11 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We propose a dark-state cooling method of trapped ion systems in the Lamb-Dicke limit. By microwave dressing the ion, we can obtain two electromagnetically induced transparency structures. The heating effects caused by the carrier and the blue sideband transition vanish due to electromagnetically induced transparency effects and the final mean phonon numbers can be much lower than the recoil limit. Our scheme is robust to fluctuations of microwave power and laser intensities, which provides a broad cooling bandwidth to cool motional modes of a linear ion chain. Moreover, it is more suitable to cool four-level ions on a large-scale ion chip.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.92.023420

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We propose a dark-state cooling method of trapped ion systems in the Lamb-Dicke limit. By microwave dressing the ion, we can obtain two electromagnetically induced transparency structures. The heating effects caused by the carrier and the blue sideband transition vanish due to electromagnetically induced transparency effects and the final mean phonon numbers can be much lower than the recoil limit. Our scheme is robust to fluctuations of microwave power and laser intensities, which provides a broad cooling bandwidth to cool motional modes of a linear ion chain. Moreover, it is more suitable to cool four-level ions on a large-scale ion chip.
We report continuous Raman sideband cooling of a long ion chain close to the motional ground state beyond the Lamb-Dicke (LD) regime. By driving multiple sideband transitions simultaneously, we show that nearly all axial modes of a 24-ion chain are cooled to the ground state, with an LD parameter as large as $\ensuremath{\eta}=1.3$, spanning a frequency bandwidth of 4 MHz. Compared to traditional ground-state cooling methods such as pulsed sideband cooling or electromagnetically-induced-transparency cooling, our method offers two key advantages: disposal of pulse optimization, and a wide bandwidth covering the entire spectrum. This technique contributes as a crucial step for large-scale quantum information processing with linear ion chains and higher dimensions alike, and can be readily generalized to other atomic and molecular systems.
We investigate the possibility of enhancement of cooling a trapped ion by combining the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effect with the standing-wave coupling. Our study shows that the quantum destructive interference which is caused by the EIT effect and the standing-wave coupling can cancel all the dominant heating effects if appropriate parameters are chosen. The analytical predictions and numerical simulations show that the final temperature can be much lower than the recoil energy. In addition, this fast-cooling scheme is robust against fluctuations of the strength of the laser beams, which makes it more feasible for experimental realization.
We propose a cooling scheme for a trapped atom using the phenomenon of cavity-induced double electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), where the atom comprising of four levels in tripod configuration is confined inside a high-finesse optical cavity. By exploiting one cavity-induced EIT, which involves one cavity photon and two laser photons, carrier transition can be eliminated due to the quantum destructive interference of excitation paths. Heating process originated from blue-sideband transition mediated by cavity field can also be prohibited due to the destructive quantum interference with the additional transition between the additional ground state and the excited state. As a consequence, the trapped atom can be cooled to the motional ground state in the leading order of the Lamb-Dicke parameters. In addition, the cooling rate is of the same order of magnitude as that obtained in the cavity-induced single EIT scheme.
A detailed study of a robust and fast laser cooling scheme on a three level system is presented. A special laser configuration, applicable to trapped ions, atoms or cantilevers, designs a quantum interference that eliminates the blue sideband in addition to the carrier transition, thus excluding any heating process involving up to one-phonon processes. As a consequence cooling achieves vanishing phonon occupation up to first order in the Lamb-Dicke parameter expansion. Underlying this scheme is a combined action of two cooling schemes which makes the proposal very stable under fluctuations of the physical parameters such as laser intensity or detuning, making it a viable candidate for experimental implementation. Furthermore, it is considerably faster than existing ground state cooling schemes, overcoming one of the limitations of current quantum information processing implementations. Its suitability as a cooling scheme for several ions in a trap or for a cloud of atoms in a dipole trap is shown.
Electromagnetically Induced Transparency (EIT) cooling is a well-established method for preparing trapped ion systems in their motional ground state. However, isolating a three-level system, as required for EIT cooling, is often challenging or impractical. Nonetheless, multilevel systems can inherently host dark states. In this work, we extend the EIT cooling framework to such multilevel systems. We develop a formalism to accurately determine the cooling rate in the weak sideband coupling regime and provide an approximate estimate for cooling rates beyond this regime, without the need for explicit simulation of the motional degree of freedom. We clarify the connection between the cooling rate and the absorption spectrum, offering a pathway for efficient near-ground-state cooling of ions with complex electronic structures.