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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Characterization of a Structural Phase Transition in Ultracold Ion Crystals

Brendin Chow, Jie Zhang, P. C. Haljan

Published Jun 2, 2020• 0 citations
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Abstract We investigate the structural transitions of ion Coulomb crystals (ICCs) using molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on the effects of ion number and the anisotropy of the confining potential. Our simulations reveal transitions from linear to zigzag to shell formation and dissolution to a two-dimensional plane finally. We characterized the phase transition points, the number of phase transitions. This study provides a more detailed analysis than previous works and establishes a power-law relationship between the critical anisotropy parameter and ion number. Our results offer valuable insights for the precise determination of ICC structure, trapped ion counting, and trapping potential parameters in experimental settings.
Phase transitions have been a research focus in many-body physics over past decades. Cold ions, under strong Coulomb repulsion, provide a repealing paradigm of exploring phase transitions in stable confinement by electromagnetic field. We demonstrate various conformations of up to sixteen laser-cooled (40)Ca(+) ion crystals in a home-built surface-electrode trap, where besides the usually mentioned structural phase transition from the linear to the zigzag, two additional phase transitions to more complicated two-dimensional configurations are identified. The experimental observation agrees well with the numerical simulation. Heating due to micromotion of the ions is analysed by comparison of the numerical simulation with the experimental observation. Our investigation implies very rich and complicated many-body behaviour in the trapped-ion systems and provides effective mechanism for further exploring quantum phase transitions and quantum information processing with ultracold trapped ions.