Abstract: Trapped ions are a promising candidate for implementing analog quantum simulation. By utilizing laser-atom interactions, individual ion qubits can be initialized, interacted, and detected. Since an ion's internal degrees of freedom represent a spin-1/2 system, many experiments have been performed to simulate the interacting quantum spins. For the last decade, an alternative approach has been used to develop a trapped-ion quantum simulator for bosonic many-body systems. The ions inherently possess another degree of freedom, a quantized motional degree of freedom, i.e., phonons. With the capability of deterministic operations together with their bosonic nature, phonons in trapped ions are excellent resources to realize quantum simulations of bosonic quantum many-body systems. In this talk, I will present progress towards the realization of quantum simulations with phonons in trapped ions, mainly focusing on the manipulation of multiple local phonons in trapped ions. In the second half of this talk, I will talk about a quantum simulation of the Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard model, based on the utilization of multiple local phonons. In this simulation, we successfully observe exotic quantum behavior of quasi-particles.
Affiliations: Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology, and Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University