[PH Faculty speak] A New Dimension: Bilayer Crystals... by Prof. Athreya Shankar, Physics, IITMadras

A New Dimension: Bilayer Crystals of Trapped Ions for Quantum Information Processing by Prof. Athreya Shankar, Physics, IITMadras on 18th September 2024
Abtract : Trapped ion systems are a leading platform for quantum information processing, but they are currently limited to 1D and 2D arrays, which imposes limitations on both their scalability and their range of applications. In this talk, I will first give a brief introduction to trapped ion quantum systems and subsequently propose a path to overcome the above limitation; I will demonstrate that a particular type of ion trap called the Penning trap can be used to realize remarkably clean bilayer crystals, wherein hundreds of ions self-organize into two well-defined layers. I will show how these bilayer crystals are made possible by the inclusion of an anharmonic trapping potential, which is readily implementable with current technology. Furthermore, I will discuss the normal modes of this system, which exhibit salient differences compared to the modes of single-plane crystals. I will also illustrate how the bilayer geometry and the unique properties of the normal modes open new opportunities, in particular in quantum sensing and quantum simulation, that are not straightforward in single-plane crystals. Excitingly, it may be possible to extend the ideas presented here to realize multilayer crystals with more than two layers. Our work increases the dimensionality of trapped ion systems by efficiently utilizing all three spatial dimensions and lays the foundation for a new generation of quantum information processing experiments with multilayer 3D crystals of trapped ions.