Speaker
Description
Over the past decades, atoms are trapped and laser cooled to near zero temperature, minimizing the motional effects in spectroscopy. Internal states of atoms can be coherently manipulated and pre-pared in pure quantum states, including entangled states that are impactful in quantum information processing, sensing, and metrology. This talk will describe the effort of the Ion Storage group at NIST in bringing molecular ions to equal footings with atoms in terms of state control and spectro-scopic precision. The project builds on laser cooling and trapping techniques, frequency comb tech-nology, and quantum-logic spectroscopy protocols nowadays routinely employed in cold-atom re-search and trapped ion optical clocks. That enables demonstrations, on single molecular ions, of co-herent quantum state manipulation [1], nondestructive state detection [1-3], rotational [4, 5] and vibrational [6] spectroscopy with better than part-per-trillion resolution, and quantum entanglement [7]. The group is exploring new opportunities in physics and chemistry offered by the richer struc-ture and broader species selections in molecules.
*In collaboration with Alejandra Collopy, Yiheng Lin, Christoph Kurz, Michael E. Harding, Philipp N. Plessow, Tara Fortier, Scott Diddams, Yu Liu, Zhimin Liu, Julian Schmidt, Dalton Chaffee, Ba-ruch Margulis, David R. Leibrandt, and Dietrich Leibfried
