Shinsuke Haze

We report precision spectroscopy of ionic-core transitions in alkaline-earth Rydberg atoms. We demonstrate high-resolution measurements of isotope shifts and hyperfine splitting of dipole transitions in ionic cores which have not been explored so far. A key element of this work is the reduction of the linewidth by more than two orders of magnitude enabled by dynamical control of Rydberg electron's orbit which significantly enhances the spectral resolution. Furthermore, to unambiguously identify the frequency shift, we directly compare core ion's spectrum with a signal from a single trapped ion serving as an ultimate frequency reference. This work provides an important foundation for quantum control of inner-core transitions, which offer an useful tool in manipulating Rydberg atom as well as a sensitive probe for electron-core interactions in atomic and molecular systems.

We report on Rydberg spectroscopy of ultracold atoms in an atom-ion hybrid trap for probing the electric fields in a mixture of atoms and ions. We obtain spectra which exhibit excitation gaps corresponding to avoided level crossings in the Stark map. From these measurements we can conclude that the ground state atoms experience electrical fields of up to 250 V/cm. There is, however, a difficulty in interpreting the results, because some data indicate that the electrical fields are produced by the ions while other data indicate that they stem from the Paul trap. We discuss possible scenarios for explaining the measured data, provide first measurements to check these scenarios, and propose methods to finally solve this puzzle.

We demonstrated sympathetic cooling of a single ion in a buffer gas of ultracold atoms with small mass. Efficient collisional cooling was realized by suppressing collision-induced heating. We attempt to explain the experimental results with a simple rate equation model and provide a quantitative discussion of the cooling efficiency per collision. The knowledge we obtained in this work is an important ingredient for advancing the technique of sympathetic cooling of ions with neutral atoms.

We report an experimental realization of the Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard (JCH) model using the internal and radial phonon states of two trapped ions. An adiabatic transfer corresponding to a quantum phase transition from a localized insulator ground state to a delocalized superfluid (SF) ground state is demonstrated. The SF phase of polaritonic excitations characteristic of the interconnected Jaynes-Cummings (JC) system is experimentally explored, where a polaritonic excitation refers to a combination of an atomic excitation and a phonon interchanged via a JC coupling.

We observed elastic collisions between laser-cooled fermionic lithium atoms and calcium ions at the energy range from 100 mK to 3 K. Lithium atoms in an optical-dipole trap were transported to the center of the ion trap using an optical tweezer technique, and a spatial overlap of the atoms and ions was realized in order to observe the atom-ion interactions. The elastic scattering rate was determined from the decay of atoms due to elastic collisions with ions. The collision-energy dependence of the elastic scattering cross-section was consistent with semi-classical collision theory.

We propose the generation of entangled states with trapped calcium ions using a combination of an rf dressed state and a spin dependent force. Using this method, a decoherence-free entangled state of rf qubits can be directly generated and ideally its fidelity is close to unity. We demonstrate an rf entangled state with a fidelity of 0.68, which has a coherence time of more than 200 ms by virtue of the fact that it is an eigenstate with energy gaps between adjacent levels.Using the same technique, we also produce a qutrit-qutrit entangled state with a fidelity of 0.77, which exceeds the threshold value for separability of 2/3.