Collective modes of a trapped ion-dipole system

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the collective excitation modes of a trapped ion and polar molecule system, exploring their potential for quantum control and simulation of condensed matter phenomena.

Contribution

It provides an analytical framework for understanding collective modes in an ion-dipole system and discusses their applications in quantum information and condensed matter simulations.

Findings

Analytical expressions for collective modes as functions of system parameters

Potential for cooling, entangling, and quantum gate implementation

Feasibility of simulating strongly-correlated phases with polar molecules

Abstract

We study a simple model consisting of an atomic ion and a polar molecule trapped in a single setup, taking into consideration their electrostatic interaction. We determine analytically their collective modes of excitation as a function of their masses, trapping frequencies, distance, and the molecule's electric dipole moment. We then discuss the application of these collective excitations to cool molecules, to entangle molecules and ions, and to realize two-qubit gates between them. We finally present a numerical analysis of the possibility of applying these tools to study magnetically ordered phases of two-dimensional arrays of polar molecules, a setup proposed to quantum-simulate some strongly-correlated models of condensed matter.