Time: Friday 3 July 2015 – 1:00pm
Place: New Horizons (Building 82), Theatre G29 (map)

Squeezing Schrödinger's cat: motional state preparation in trapped ions using dissipation

Vlad Negnevitsky, ETH Zurich

Trapped ions are among the leading platforms for quantum technologies, largely thanks to the excellent control achievable over both their motional and their internal states. I will review the physics behind a trapped calcium ion in a Paul trap, which can be modelled as a three-level system and a quantum harmonic oscillator coupled by laser light. A key technique in ion trapping is sideband cooling, a common method relying on dissipation to prepare an ion in its motional ground state. I will illustrate how the ideas behind it can be generalised to the preparation of coherent and squeezed motional states, important in applications such as metrology, and present results showing how the same strategies can be used to efficiently probe such states. Finally, I show how an ion's motional squeezed state can be entangled with two internal states and spatially split in half, creating a 'squeezed Schrödinger's cat'.

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