Quantum harmonic oscillator state synthesis by reservoir engineering

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates reservoir engineering with a trapped ion to reliably generate and verify various quantum states, including squeezed and coherent states, despite environmental noise, advancing quantum state control.

Contribution

It introduces a method to produce steady quantum states in noisy environments using reservoir engineering with trapped ions, enabling new quantum experiments.

Findings

Successful generation of squeezed, coherent, and displaced-squeezed states

High contrast spin-motion Rabi oscillations verify state creation

Method applicable to entanglement and quantum simulations

Abstract

The robust generation of quantum states in the presence of decoherence is a primary challenge for explorations of quantum mechanics at larger scales. Using the mechanical motion of a single trapped ion, we utilize reservoir engineering to generate squeezed, coherent and displaced-squeezed states as steady states in the presence of noise. We verify the created state by generating two-state correlated spin-motion Rabi oscillations resulting in high contrast measurements. For both cooling and measurement, we use spin-oscillator couplings that provide transitions between oscillator states in an engineered Fock state basis. Our approach should facilitate studies of entanglement, quantum computation, and open-system quantum simulations in a wide range of physical systems.