Building and characterizing a stylus ion-trap system

Cold trapped ions can be excellent sensors for ultra-precision detection of physical quantities,which strongly depends on the measurement situation at hand.The stylus ion trap,formed by two concentric cylinders over a ground plane,holds the promise of relatively simple structure and larger solid angle for optical access and fluorescence collection in comparison with the conventional ion traps.Here we report our fabrication and characterization of the first stylus ion trap constructed in China,aiming for studying quantum optics and sensing weak electric fields in the future.We have observed the stable confinement of the ion in the trapping potential for more than two hours and measured the heating rate of the trap to be dε/dt=7.10±0.13 meV/s by the Doppler recooling method.Our work starts a way to building practical quantum sensors with high efficiency of optical collection and with ultimate goal for contributing to future quantum information technology.

Stochastic Resonance in a Single-Ion Nonlinear Mechanical Oscillator

Stochastic resonance is a counterintuitive phenomenon amplifying the weak periodic signal by application of external noise.We demonstrate the enhancement of a weak periodic signal by stochastic resonance in a trappedion oscillator when the oscillator is excited to the nonlinear regime and subject to an appropriate noise.Under the full control of the radio-frequency drive voltage,this amplification originates from the nonlinearity due to asymmetry of the trapping potential,which can be described by a forced Duffing oscillator model.Our scheme and results provide an interesting possibility to make use of controllable nonlinearity in the trapped ion,and pave the way toward a practical atomic sensor for sensitively detecting weak periodic signals from real noisy environment.

Detection of DC electric forces with zeptonewton sensitivity by single-ion phonon laser

Detecting extremely small forces helps exploring new physics quantitatively.Here we demonstrate that the phonon laser made of a single trapped ^(40)Ca^(+) ion behaves as an exquisite sensor for small force measurement.We report our successful detection of small electric forces regarding the DC trapping potential with sensitivity of(2.41±0.49)zN/√Hz,with the ion only under Doppler cooling,based on the injection-locking of the oscillation phase of the phonon laser in addition to the classical squeezing applied to suppress the measurement uncertainty.We anticipate that such a single-ion sensor would reach a much better force detection sensitivity in the future once the trapping system is further improved and the fluorescence collection efficiency is further enhanced.