Trapped-ion oscillator prepares Schrödinger cat manifolds of two to five components
A single trapped-ion oscillator in the strongly nonlinear regime produced localized cat-state manifolds and allowed measurements on them, the authors report.
A study in Science Advances describes control of a quantum harmonic oscillator formed by a single trapped ion. The ion was operated in the strongly nonlinear regime of the atom-light interaction, where, as the authors note, designing control protocols is often difficult science.org
Science Advancesscience.orgOpen source ↗.
Using a new form of nonlinear reservoir engineering, the team generated localized Schrödinger's cat manifolds with two, three, four and five components. The authors then selected Hamiltonians that allow measurements to be made on these state manifolds.
According to the authors, the work demonstrates experimental use of high-order nonlinear processes to control nonclassical states of the oscillator. They say this gives a toolbox that can be applied to bosonic quantum error correction, computation and sensing.
