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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Ion Coulomb crystals are self-organized ordered structures that form in the ion traps at ultra-low temperatures achievable by the application of the laser cooling. The high precision and controllability of Coulomb crystals enabled by the ion trap technology makes this system excellent for quantum computing and simulation as well as investigating non-linear collective phenomena such as nanofriction.
This talk will present recent results on emulating nanofriction in ion traps using an ion Coulomb crystal in a two-row zigzag chain configuration. A structural topological defect (kink) is introduced into the chain using non-adiabatic quench from a linear to zigzag chain configuration via a Kibble-Zurek mechanism. This defect introduces a mismatch between ion spacing in the two rows. The strength of Coulomb interaction between the two rows is varied by changing the trapping parameters. We show that there exists a critical value of interaction strength at which the shear vibrational mode vanishes, which is analogous to a finite size Aubry phase transition in Frenkel-Kontorova model of nanofriction. We investigate this phase transition using numerical simulations and present the experimental results.
Host: Francesco Caravelli