M. Čížek

We report on the robust experimental accumulation of nonclassicallity of motion of a single trapped ion. The nonclassicality stems from deterministic incoherent modulation of thermal phonon number distribution implemented by a laser excitation of nonlinear coupling between the ion's internal - electronic levels and external - motional states. We demonstrate that the repetitive application of this nonlinear process monotonically accumulates the observable state nonclassicality. The output states converge to a phonon number distribution with high overlap with a particular Fock state and visible quantum non-Gaussian aspects including corresponding negative Wigner function. The resulting oscillator states prove deterministic transition in the hierarchy of quantum non-Gaussianity up to four phonons. This transition is very robust against experimental imperfections and produces increasing entanglement potential.

The vast majority of physical objects we are dealing with are almost exclusively made of atoms. Due to their discrete level structure, single atoms have proved to be emitters of light which is incompatible with the classical description of electromagnetic waves. We demonstrate this incompatibility for atomic fluorescence when scaling up the size of the source ensemble, which consists of trapped atomic ions, by several orders of magnitude. The presented measurements of nonclassical statistics on light unconditionally emitted from ensembles containing up to more than a thousand ions promise further scalability to much larger emitter numbers. The methodology can be applied to a broad range of experimental platforms focusing on the bare nonclassical character of single isolated emitters.