Trapped ions as vibrational beam splitters: SU(2) states in a two-dimensional ion trap
Shih-Chuan Gou, P. L. Knight · Physical Review A · 1996
A scheme for preparing vibrational SU(2) states of motion in a two-dimensional ion trap is described. These anticorrelated two-mode states are formally equivalent to the output photon states of a lossless SU(2) interferometer with number-state inputs. Nontrivial statistics such as the binomial distribution and the discrete ``arcsine'' distribution can be generated in the vibrational states of trapped ions, and detected by measuring the population inversion of the ion driven by a laser field along a specific direction. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.