Prototype of a phonon laser with trapped ions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tunable phonon laser prototype using a large trapped ion array with optical tweezers to create an acoustic cavity, enabling control over lasing dynamics and mode interactions.

Contribution

It presents a novel phonon laser scheme with tunable cavity parameters and demonstrates mode competition and synchronization in a trapped ion system.

Findings

Controlled cavity loss via tweezer strength

Observation of lasing threshold and coherence

Mode competition and synchronization

Abstract

We propose a tunable phonon laser prototype with a large trapped ion array, where some of the ions are effectively pinned by optical tweezers, thus isolating a subset of ions that mimics an acoustic cavity used as a phonon lasing resonator. The cavity loss can then be controlled by the tweezer strength and the "wall thickness", the number of pinned ions for isolation. We pump the resonator by applying blue-sideband lasers, and investigate the lasing dynamics of the cavity modes such as threshold behavior, population distribution, the second-order coherence, and line-narrowed spectrum. This scheme can be generalized to resonators consisting of multiple cavity modes formed by a few ions, where we demonstrate mode competition and synchronization as lasing modes have developed.