Modeling near ground-state cooling of two-dimensional ion crystals in a Penning trap using electromagnetically induced transparency

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through numerical simulations that electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) cooling can rapidly bring the motional modes of large two-dimensional ion crystals in Penning traps close to their ground state, enhancing quantum simulation quality.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical analysis of EIT cooling efficiency for large 2D ion crystals in Penning traps, accounting for complex trap dynamics and multi-ion effects, which was not previously characterized.

Findings

EIT cooling can achieve near ground-state occupations within a few hundred microseconds.

Cooling time constants are tens of microseconds for the center-of-mass mode.

Cooling rate increases with the number of ions.

Abstract

Penning traps, with their ability to control planar crystals of tens to hundreds of ions, are versatile quantum simulators. Thermal occupations of the motional drumhead modes, transverse to the plane of the ion crystal, degrade the quality of quantum simulations. Laser cooling using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT cooling) is attractive as an efficient way to quickly initialize the drumhead modes to near ground-state occupations. We numerically investigate the efficiency of EIT cooling of planar ion crystals in a Penning trap, accounting for complications arising from the nature of the trap and from the simultaneous cooling of multiple ions. We show that, in spite of challenges, the large bandwidth of drumhead modes (hundreds of kilohertz) can be rapidly cooled to near ground-state occupations within a few hundred microseconds. Our predictions for the center-of-mass mode include a cooling time constant of tens of microseconds and an enhancement of the cooling rate with increasing number of ions. Successful experimental demonstrations of EIT cooling in the NIST Penning trap [E. Jordan, K. A. Gilmore, A. Shankar, A. Safavi-Naini, M. J. Holland, and J. J. Bollinger, "Near ground-state cooling of two-dimensional trapped-ion crystals with more than 100 ions", (2018), submitted.] validate our predictions.