Karl Nicolas Tolazzi

We report the experimental realization of a single-atom heat engine. An ion is confined in a linear Paul trap with tapered geometry and driven thermally by coupling it alternately to hot and cold reservoirs. The output power of the engine is used to drive a harmonic oscillation. From direct measurements of the ion dynamics, we determine the thermodynamic cycles for various temperature differences of the reservoirs. We use these cycles to evaluate power $P$ and efficiency $η$ of the engine, obtaining up to $P=342\,$yJ and $η=0.28 \,\%$, consistent with analytical estimations. Our results demonstrate that thermal machines can be reduced to the ultimate limit of single atoms.

We experimentally demonstrate a method to determine the temperature of trapped ions which is suitable for monitoring fast thermalization processes. We show that observing and analyzing the lineshape of dark resonances in the fluorescence spectrum provides a temperature measurement which accurate over a large dynamic range, applied to single ions and small ion crystals. Laser induced fluorescence is detected over a time of only $20\,μ$s allowing for rapid determination of the ion temperature. In the measurement range of $10^{-1}-10^{+2}\,$mK we reach better than $15\,\%$ accuracy. Tuning the cooling laser to selected resonance features allows for controlling the ion temperatures between $0.7\,$mK and more than $10\,$mK. Experimental work is supported by a solution of the 8-level optical Bloch equations when including the ions classical motion. This technique paves the way for many experiments comprising heat transport in ion strings, heat engines, non-equilibrium thermodynamics or thermometry of large ion crystals.