Research at the ITCM-Group at Sussex: From cavity-QED to molecular Physics with trapped ions

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• Matthias Keller (Sussex)
• Friday 02 December 2016, 12:00-13:00
• Physics East 217.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Giovanni Barontini.

I will present the current experiments in my research group at the University of Sussex: Cavity-QED: The complementary benefits of trapped ions and photons as carriers of quantum information make it appealing to combine them in a joint system. Ions provide low decoherence rates, long storage times and high readout efficiency, while photons travel over long distances. To interface the quantum states of ions and photons efficiently, we use calcium ions coupled to an optical high-finesse cavity via a Raman transition. To achieve strong ion-cavity coupling we employ fibre tip cavities integrated into the electrodes of an endcap style ion trap. We trap single calcium ions with a life time of several hours and have optimised the ion-cavity overlap to observe the interaction of the cavity with the ion. In another experiment, we combine a conventional cavity with a linear ion trap to facilitate the investigation of the interaction of multiple ions with a single cavity mode. We have demonstrated the localisation of several ions in a collinear cavity-trap system and have demonstrated the emission of polarised single photons from this system. Molecular Physics: High resolution spectroscopy has been identified as a tool to search for changes in the electron-to-proton mass ratio. The prime candidate for this has been the molecular hydrogen ion due to its simple internal structure and existing high accuracy structure calculations. However, also N2+ is a promising candidate due to its low systematic level shifts. Employing molecular nitrogen in the I=0 nuclear spin configuration, vibrational spectroscopy with fractional systematic frequency shifts on the order of 10-18 seem feasible. To generate a spectroscopic signal the internal state of a trapped molecule is transferred to co-trapped atomic ions through their joint motion in the trapping potential. Due to the atomic cycling transition, the state information can then be extracted by observing the atomic ion’s florescence. We trap single N2+ ions alongside Ca+ ions in a linear rf-ion trap and explore a range of detection techniques to extract the molecular state information.

This talk is part of the Cold atoms series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Bham Talks
• Cold Atoms
• Cold atoms
• Physics East 217
• What's on in Physics?

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