Building a Stylus Trap and Deep Parabolic Mirror to Study and Control Quantum Jumps

We present a method for studying quantum jumps in trapped barium ions using a "stylus" trap and deep parabolic mirror. This novel design minimizes the solid angle blocked by the trap structure allowing ~95% of the photons from the ion to hit the surrounding mirror. The trapped ion will sit at the focus of the mirror, and a lens will focus the collimated fluorescence onto avalanche photodiodes. This experimental design results in a total single photon detection efficiency of about 65%.

Part of the motivation for this research comes from work of Minev et al [1] who found that they could predict, and even reverse, a quantum jump from ground state to first excited state of a superconducting artificial three-level atom. Once our trap is complete, we plan on attempting to replicate these results.

In addition to the development of this new trap, we are in the process of analyzing data from our first parabolic mirror trap whose photon detection efficiency is ~10% and from a linear trap. The preliminary results from this analysis show higher quantum jump transition rates for the ions on the ends of six or eight ion chains. This is not what we anticipated, so we have created simulated data to process using data analysis and confirm it is working as expected.