E. Demler

The dynamics of cold trapped ions in a high-finesse resonator results from the interplay between the long-range Coulomb repulsion and the cavity-induced interactions. The latter are due to multiple scatterings of laser photons inside the cavity and become relevant when the laser pump is sufficiently strong to overcome photon decay. We study the stationary states of ions coupled with a mode of a standing-wave cavity as a function of the cavity and laser parameters, when the typical length scales of the two self-organizing processes, Coulomb crystallization and photon-mediated interactions, are incommensurate. The dynamics are frustrated and in specific limiting cases can be cast in terms of the Frenkel-Kontorova model, which reproduces features of friction in one dimension. We numerically recover the sliding and pinned phases. For strong cavity nonlinearities, they are in general separated by bistable regions where superlubric and stick-slip dynamics coexist. The cavity, moreover, acts as a thermal reservoir and can cool the chain vibrations to temperatures controlled by the cavity parameters and by the ions phase. These features are imprinted in the radiation emitted by the cavity, which is readily measurable in state-of-art setups of cavity quantum electrodynamics.

We discuss a method to achieve decoherence resistent entanglement generation in two level spin systems governed by gapped and multi-degenerate Hamiltonians. In such systems, while the large number of degrees of freedom in the ground state levels allows to create various quantum superpositions, the energy gap prevents decoherence. We apply the protected evolution to achieve decoherence resistent generation of many particle GHZ states and show it can significantly increase the sensitivity in frequency spectroscopy. We discuss how to engineer the desired many-body protected manifold in two specific physical systems, trapped ions and neutral atoms in optical lattices, and present simple expressions for the fidelity of GHZ generation under non-ideal conditions.

We propose and analyze a scheme that makes use of interactions between spins to protect certain correlated many-body states from decoherence. The method exploits the finite energy gap of properly designed Hamiltonians to generate a manifold insensitive to local noise fluctuations. We apply the scheme to achieve decoherence-resistant generation of many particle GHZ states and show that it can improve the sensitivity in precision spectroscopy with trapped ions. Finally we also show that cold atoms in optical lattices interacting via short range interactions can be utilized to engineer the required long range interactions for a robust generation of entangled states.