Trapped Ion System for Quantum Simulation with Phonons

Jeffrey Cohn, James K. Freericks

C.‐C. Joseph Wang, James K. Freericks

C.-C. Joseph Wang, James K. Freericks

Or Katz, Christopher R. Monroe

Trapped atomic ion crystals are a leading platform for quantum simulations of spin systems, with programmable and long-range spin-spin interactions mediated by excitations of phonons in the crystal. We describe a complementary approach for quantum simulations of bosonic systems using phonons in trapped-ion crystals, here mediated by excitations of the trapped-ion spins. The scheme enables a high degree of programability across a dense graph of bosonic couplings, utilizing long-lived collective phonon modes in a trapped-ion chain. As such, it is well suited for tackling hard problems such as boson sampling and simulations of long-range bosonic and spin-boson Hamiltonians.

Richart E. Slusher

Peter A. Ivanov, Svetoslav S. Ivanov, Nikolay V. Vitanov +3 more

We present a 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 induces 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 tuning of the hopping frequency by adjusting the axial trapping frequency and the phonon-phonon repulsion via 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.