Localization of phonons in ion traps with controlled quantum disorder

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how the vibrational modes of trapped ion chains can be used to study disordered quantum systems, revealing localization phenomena through quantum superpositions and minimally invasive measurements, enabling high-temperature experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a method to explore Anderson localization in ion traps using quantum superpositions and resonance fluorescence without requiring ground-state cooling or individual ion addressing.

Findings

Observation of localized vibrational modes in ion chains

Effective simulation of disordered quantum systems

Potential for high-temperature quantum disorder experiments

Abstract

We show that the vibrations of a chain of trapped ions offer an interesting route to explore the physics of disordered quantum systems. By preparing the internal state of the ions in a quantum superposition, we show how the local vibrational energy becomes a stochastic variable, being its statistical properties inherited from the underlying quantum parallelism of the internal state. We describe a minimally-perturbing measurement of the resonance fluorescence, which allows us to study effects like Anderson localization without the need of ground-state cooling or individual addressing, and thus paves the way towards high-temperature ion experiments.