Parallel Electromagnetically Induced Transparency near Ground-State Cooling of a Trapped-Ion Crystal

Abstract

We theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a parallel electromagnetically induced transparency (parallel EIT) cooling technique for ion crystals in the Paul trap. It breaks the stringent cooling requirements of the standard EIT cooling, thus allowing, in principle, to simultaneously cool the motional mode spectrum with an arbitrary range. Experimentally a large cooling range over 5 MHz is proved by using a single trapped ${}^{40}{\mathrm{Ca}}^{+}$ ion. We also observe simultaneous near-ground-state cooling for all motional modes of a 4-ion chain with the best average phonon number of about 0.2. For cooling a large number of modes, we only need to modulate the probe beam of the standard EIT cooling with several rf frequencies. This cooling scheme has no selectivity for the types of ions (e.g., ${}^{171}{\mathrm{Yb}}^{+}$, ${}^{40}{\mathrm{Ca}}^{+}$), therefore it would be a powerful tool for initialization of all kinds of operational trapped-ion quantum computers or simulators.