Quantum simulation of the dynamical Casimir effect with trapped ions

TL;DR

This paper proposes a quantum simulation method using trapped ions to observe the dynamical Casimir effect, enabling the study of photon production from vacuum fluctuations without relativistic cavity movements.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ion-trap based quantum simulation model that maps cavity field dynamics to phonons, facilitating experimental exploration of the dynamical Casimir effect.

Findings

Numerical simulations show the viability of the ion chain model under realistic conditions.

The model accurately reproduces photon production analogous to the dynamical Casimir effect.

The approach enables probing quantum vacuum phenomena at the single-photon level.

Abstract

Quantum vacuum fluctuations are a direct manifestation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The dynamical Casimir effect allows for the observation of these vacuum fluctuations by turning them into real, observable photons. However, the observation of this effect in a cavity QED experiment would require the rapid variation of the length of a cavity with relativistic velocities, a daunting challenge. Here, we propose a quantum simulation of the dynamical Casimir effect using an ion chain confined in a segmented ion trap. We derive a discrete model that enables us to map the dynamics of the multimode radiation field inside a variable-length cavity to radial phonons of the ion crystal. We perform a numerical study comparing the ion-chain quantum simulation under realistic experimental parameters to an ideal Fabry-Perot cavity, demonstrating the viability of the mapping. The proposed quantum simulator, therefore, allows for probing the photon (respectively phonon) production caused by the dynamical Casimir effect on the single photon level.