近日，德国联邦物理技术研究所的L.-A. Ruffert与马克思普朗克物理研究所的E. A. Dijck等人合作并取得一项新进展。他们揭示了协同冷却高电荷离子诱导混合组分库仑晶体的畴形成和结构稳定性。相关研究成果已于2024年12月12日在国际知名学术期刊《物理评论A》上发表。

为了理解强排斥力如何影响晶体结构和动力学，研究人员通过测量和模拟研究了小型混合线性晶体和同质晶体的热运动和重排。共晶化的高电荷态离子（HCIs）会形成超晶格，并将晶体划分为不同的畴，在这些畴中，由于跨越边界的运动模式解耦，观察到了不同的重排速率、熔点和局部相变。

这些结果增进了研究人员对广泛电荷质量比范围内同质和异质离子串的理解。这使他们能够测试自己对离子串动态行为的模拟，并增强了他们对这些模拟在量子模拟、计算以及新物理探索等应用领域适用性的信心。

据悉，利用嵌入激光冷却离子库仑晶体中的协同冷却高电荷态离子（HCIs）进行基础研究的高精度光谱学和频率计量学正日益受到关注。

附：英文原文

Title: Domain formation and structural stabilities in mixed-species Coulomb crystals induced by sympathetically cooled highly charged ions

Author: L.-A. Rüffert, E. A. Dijck, L. Timm, J. R. Crespo López-Urrutia, T. E. Mehlstubler

Issue&Volume: 2024/12/12

Abstract: There is a growing interest in high-precision spectroscopy and frequency metrology for fundamental studies using sympathetically cooled highly charged ions (HCIs) embedded in Coulomb crystals of laser-cooled ions. In order to understand how their strong repulsion affects the crystal structure and dynamics, we study the thermal motion and rearrangement of small mixed linear and homogeneous crystals by both measurements and simulations. Cocrystallized HCIs form superlattices and divide the crystal into domains, where different reordering rates, melting points, and localized phase transitions are observed due to decoupling of motional modes across boundaries. These results improve our understanding of homogeneous and inhomogeneous ion strings over a wide range of charge-to-mass ratios. This allows us to test our own simulations of the dynamic behavior of ion strings and gives us confidence in their suitability for applications related to quantum simulation as well as computing and the search for new physics.

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.110.063110

Source: https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.110.063110