Spectroscopy of a Trapped Ion in a Standing Wave

Abstract

With the recent surge for an experimentally viable quantum computer, trapped ions have come to the forefront as one of the most practical systems from which to construct a quantum computing architecture. This work has continued to explore the feasibility of using trapped ions as quantum bits, addressing the issue of quantum decoherence due to non-resonant excitation by studying the spectroscopy of a trapped ion through a standing wave.

The standing wave studied in this thesis was formed on the face of a surface-electrode ion trap held at cryogenic temperatures. Although the trap was not built with a reflective surface in mind, a lower bound on the fringe visibility was measured to be 0.717. By moving the ion through the nodes and anti-nodes of the wave, the carrier and sidebands of the S_1/2 to D_5/2 transition, commonly used for information storage, were selectively stimulated and suppressed.