Please join us for this week’s AMO/QI seminar to celebrate Dr. Neil Glikin’s completion of his dissertation! After his talk there will be a celebratory lunch. Here is a zoom link in case you cannot attend in person.
He will be giving a talk titled: Creating and Destroying Rotational Coherence with Trapped Ions

Abstract:
Far from being just qubits, trapped ions are also near-ideal quantum harmonic oscillators thanks to their external motion. Over the past few decades, researchers have engineered oscillator motion into a wide variety of interesting, exotic, and useful nonclassical states. This talk is centered around a system which fundamentally deviates from this usual situation: By allowing ions to physically rotate around one another, their motion becomes rotor-like rather than oscillator-like. The key to realizing this system is a surface-electrode ion trap which is highly circularly symmetric. Our trapped-ion rotor carries the promise of unlocking a new rotor-based category of experiments. I will discuss how we prepare the quantum state of the rotor, in particular how we create coherent superpositions of angular momenta. I will also discuss how we have used this system to systematically probe the open quantum dynamics of a rotor interacting with its environment. Here, we have observed for the first time simple scaling laws for rotor decoherence. Finally, I will discuss a proposal for an experiment in which one can directly observe the consequences of exchanging a pair of identical particles. This will be done by superposing a reference state with one in which the particles have rotated by pi radians relative to each other.