Suppression of Ion Transport due to Long-Lived Subwavelength Localization by an Optical Lattice

We report the localization of an ion by a one-dimensional optical lattice in the presence of an applied external force. The ion is confined radially by a radio frequency trap and axially by a combined electrostatic and optical-lattice potential. Using a resolved Raman sideband technique, one or seve...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Karpa, Leon, Bylinskii, Alexei, Gangloff, Dorian, Cetina, Marko, Vuletic, Vladan
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/84970
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-0538
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8276-8256
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7100-0847
Description
Summary:We report the localization of an ion by a one-dimensional optical lattice in the presence of an applied external force. The ion is confined radially by a radio frequency trap and axially by a combined electrostatic and optical-lattice potential. Using a resolved Raman sideband technique, one or several ions are cooled to a mean vibrational number ⟨n⟩ = (0.1 ± 0.1) along the optical lattice. We measure the average position of a periodically driven ion with a resolution down to λ/40, and demonstrate localization to a single lattice site for up to 10 ms. This opens new possibilities for studying many-body systems with long-range interactions in periodic potentials, as well as fundamental models of friction.