Luis Ortiz-Gutiérrez

A single $^{40}$Ca ion is confine in the harmonic potential of a Paul trap and cooled to a temperature of a few mK, with a wave packet of sub-m spatial and sub-m/s velocity uncertainty. Deterministically extracted from the Paul trap, the single ion is propagating over a distance of 0.27 m and detected. By engineering the ion extraction process on the initial wave packet, theoretically modeling the ion trajectories, and studying experimentally the time-of-flight distribution, we directly infer the state of the previously trapped ion. This analysis allows for accurate remote sensing of the previous motional excitation in the trap potential, both coherently or incoherently. Our method paves a way to extract, manipulate and design quantum wave packets also outside of the Paul trap.

We consider the quantum processor based on a chain of trapped ions to propose an architecture wherein the motional degrees of freedom of trapped ions (position and momentum) could be exploited as the computational Hilbert space. We adopt a continuous-variables approach to develop a toolbox of quantum operations to manipulate one or two vibrational modes at a time. Together with the intrinsic non-linearity of the qubit degree of freedom, employed to mediate the interaction between modes, arbitrary manipulation and readout of the ionic wave function could be achieved.