Tobias Sägesser

Non-linearities are a key feature allowing non-classical control of quantum harmonic oscillators. However, when non-linearities are strong, designing protocols for control is often difficult, placing a barrier to exploiting these properties fully. Here, using a single trapped-ion oscillator operated in the strongly non-linear regime of the atom-light interaction, we show how to generate localized multi (2, 3, 4, and 5)-component Schrödinger's cat manifolds using a novel form of non-linear reservoir engineering. We then specifically select Hamiltonians which allow us to perform measurements on these state manifolds. To our knowledge, our work is the first experimental use of such high order non-linear processes for control of non-classical states of a quantum harmonic oscillator, opening up a new toolbox which can be applied to bosonic quantum error correction, computation, and sensing.

Single-atom quantum sensors offer high spatial resolution and high sensitivity to electric and magnetic fields. Among them, trapped ions offer exceptional performance in sensing electric fields, which has been used in particular to probe these in the proximity of metallic surfaces. However, the flexibility of previous work was limited by the use of radio-frequency trapping fields, which has restricted spatial scanning to linear translations, and calls into question whether observed phenomena are connected to the presence of the radio-frequency fields. Here, using a Penning trap instead, we demonstrate a single ion probe which offers three-dimensional position scanning at distances between $50$ $μ\mathrm{m}$ and $450$ $μ\mathrm{m}$ from a metallic surface and above a $200\times200$ $μ\mathrm{m}^{2}$ area, allowing us to reconstruct static and time-varying electric as well as magnetic fields. We use this to map charge distributions on the metallic surface and noise stemming from it. The methods demonstrated here allow similar probing to be carried out on samples with a variety of materials, surface constitutions and geometries, providing a new tool for surface science.

Trapped ions in radio-frequency traps are among the leading approaches for realizing quantum computers, due to high-fidelity quantum gates and long coherence times. However, the use of radio-frequencies presents a number of challenges to scaling, including requiring compatibility of chips with high voltages, managing power dissipation and restricting transport and placement of ions. By replacing the radio-frequency field with a 3 T magnetic field, we here realize a micro-fabricated Penning ion trap which removes these restrictions. We demonstrate full quantum control of an ion in this setting, as well as the ability to transport the ion arbitrarily in the trapping plane above the chip. This unique feature of the Penning micro-trap approach opens up a modification of the Quantum CCD architecture with improved connectivity and flexibility, facilitating the realization of large-scale trapped-ion quantum computing, quantum simulation and quantum sensing.

We investigate theoretically the possibility for robust and fast cooling of a trapped atomic ion by transient interaction with a pre-cooled ion. The transient coupling is achieved through dynamical control of the ions' equilibrium positions. To achieve short cooling times we make use of shortcuts to adiabaticity by applying invariant-based engineering. We design these to take account of imperfections such as stray fields, and trap frequency offsets. For settings appropriate to a currently operational trap in our laboratory, we find that robust performance could be achieved down to $6.3$ motional cycles, comprising $14.2\ \mathrm{μs}$ for ions with a $0.44\ \mathrm{MHz}$ trap frequency. This is considerably faster than can be achieved using laser cooling in the weak coupling regime, which makes this an attractive scheme in the context of quantum computing.