A phonon laser in the quantum regime

T. Behrle, T. L. Nguyen, F. Reiter, D. Baur, B. de Neeve, M. Stadler, M. Marinelli, F. Lancellotti, S. F. Yelin, J. P. Home

Published 2023-01-19Version 1

We demonstrate a trapped-ion system with two competing dissipation channels, implemented independently on two ion species co-trapped in a Paul trap. By controlling coherent spin-oscillator couplings and optical pumping rates we explore the phase diagram of this system, which exhibits a regime analogous to that of a (phonon) laser but operates close to the quantum ground state with an average phonon number of $\bar{n}<10$. We demonstrate phase locking of the oscillator to an additional resonant drive, and also observe the phase diffusion of the resulting state under dissipation by reconstructing the quantum state from a measurement of the characteristic function.