Polarized light-induced electron transfer simulation on the Yb¹⁷¹⁺ qutrit system

The study of electron transfer is helpful to understand energy conversion, signaling as well as catalysis in living and non-living systems. Quantum effects play an important role in the electron transfer processes. The connectivity between electronic states and the interference of different paths will influence the electron transfer efficiency a lot. In nature, the interference due to the quantum effect in the electron transfer process is hard to observe due to the fast decoherence and strict requirements of degeneracies. The trapped-ion simulator, which processes long coherence time and adjustable flexibility, can offer an efficient platform to implement or predict the quantum interference process. Moreover, compared to the typical way of using qubits (two-level system) to simulate the electron transfer process, utilizing qudits (d-level system) can potentially decrease the experimental time and enhance the quantum coherence. Thus, the simulation fidelity will be improved by a large amount. In this talk, I will present the experimental results of simulating the polarized light-induced electron transfer on the Yb¹⁷¹⁺ qutrit (3-level system) system. The coherence performance will be improved by more than 100 times compared to the qubits.