Atomic and molecular ions with photon resonators for quantum information science

Abstract

With continued development of laser-atom interaction, systems of trapped ions offer a promising platform for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum information processing (QIP). Much progress with single atomic and molecular ion qubits has been made both in theory and experiment on the fundamental building blocks for scalable QIP architectures. Nonetheless, difficulty still remains for quantum network implementation and spectroscopy protocols for atomic and molecular ions, respectively. The objective of this thesis is to design and test the ion trap integration with photon resonators, which can facilitate coherent ion-photon state transfer in quantum networks, and microwave spectroscopy for molecular ion rotational states. The first part of the thesis describes a novel planar trap design with an integrated optical cavity. Proposals for photon number memory with trapped ions are presented, and experimental implementation for single ion cavity QED is explored. In addition, a study of vacuum-induced scattering loss increase is performed for mirror coatings at several temperatures and wavelengths, from which a method of retaining cavity finesse was developed. In the second part, an experiment is proposed for microwave quantum logic spectroscopy of molecular ions. With a cavity field to facilitate entanglement between co-trapped single atomic and molecular ions, a reliable and non-destructive spectroscopy method, as well as molecular ground state cooling can be realized.