Efficient Ground-State Cooling of Large Trapped-Ion Chains with an Electromagnetically-Induced-Transparency Tripod Scheme

Phys Rev Lett. 2020 Jul 31;125(5):053001. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.053001.

Abstract

We report the electromagnetically-induced-transparency (EIT) cooling of a large trapped ^{171}Yb^{+} ion chain to the quantum ground state. Unlike conventional EIT cooling, we engage a four-level tripod structure and achieve fast sub-Doppler cooling over all motional modes. We observe simultaneous ground-state cooling across the complete transverse mode spectrum of up to 40 ions, occupying a bandwidth of over 3 MHz. The cooling time is observed to be less than 300 μs, independent of the number of ions. Such efficient cooling across the entire spectrum is essential for high-fidelity quantum operations using trapped ion crystals for quantum simulators or quantum computers.