Efficient cooling of trapped ions is a prerequisite for various applications of the ions in precision spectroscopy, quantum information, and coherence control. Raman sideband cooling is an effective method to cool the ions to their motional ground state. We investigate both numerically and experimentally the optimization of Raman sideband cooling strategies and propose an efficient one, which can simplify the experimental setup as well as reduce the number of cooling pulses. Several cooling schemes are tested and compared through numerical simulations. The simulation result shows that the fixed-width pulses and varied-width pulses have almost the same efficiency for both the first-order and the second-order Raman sideband cooling. The optimized strategy is verified experimentally. A single
25Mg+ ion is trapped in a linear Paul trap and Raman sideband cooled, and the achieved average vibrational quantum numbers under different cooling strategies are evaluated. A good agreement between the experimental result and the simulation result is obtained.
We present a single solid-state laser system to cool, coherently manipulate and detect
25Mg
+ ions. Coherent manipulation is accomplished by coupling two hyperfine ground state levels using a pair of far-detuned Raman laser beams. Resonant light for Doppler cooling and detection is derived from the same laser source by means of an electro-optic modulator, generating a sideband which is resonant with the atomic transition. We demonstrate ground-state cooling of one of the vibrational modes of the ion in the trap using resolved-sideband cooling. The cooling performance is studied and discussed by observing the temporal evolution of Raman-stimulated sideband transitions. The setup is a major simplification over existing state-of-the-art systems, typically involving up to three separate laser sources.
We demonstrate the implementation of a spin qubit with a single 40 Ca + ion in a micro ion trap. The qubit is encoded in the Zeeman ground state levels m J = +1/2 and m J = −1/2 of the S 1/2 state of the ion. We show sideband cooling close to the vibrational ground state and demonstrate the initialization and readout of the qubit levels with 99.5% efficiency. We employ a Raman transition close to the S 1/2 –P 1/2 resonance for coherent manipulation of the qubit. We observe single qubit rotations with 96% fidelity and gate times below 5 µs. Rabi oscillations on the blue motional sideband are used to extract the phonon number distribution. The dynamics of this distribution is analysed to deduce the trap-induced heating rate of 0.3(1) phonons ms −1 .