Pagano Lab welcomes a new group of undergraduates that will join the group this summer.

• Caesar (Rice University) will work on a new rectifier scheme used to stabilize the rf voltage that determines trap frequency in the trapped-ion system.
• Brian (San Jacinto College) will design and build a Faraday cage to limit the effect of environmental noise on the trap frequency.
• Lucius (USTC) will design a new filter box and work on a transfer cavity setup for locking our lasers.
• Kabir (Rice University) will work on ArtiQ to make our Rice university branch more user friendly and more integrated with NDscan.

Looking forward for a productive summer!

Pagano Lab congratulates Mingjian Zhu for graduating with the thesis entitled:

“Excitation Energy Transfer and Delocalization in Trapped-ion Quantum Simulator: A Numerical Study”.

Mingjian will start his PhD with Professor Han Pu at Rice University next Fall. Congratulations!

Four undergrads will join the team this summer! John will work on the ArtiQ control system, Prathik will build a small muon detector, Mac will develop a PID out of a Red Pitaya and Mingjian will help us understand how to simulate electron transfer in trapped-ion systems. It’s going to be a fun summer!

Guido is awarded the Department of Energy Early Career Award. This program will be focused on new analog and hybrid analog-digital quantum simulation protocols that can
directly realize quantum field theories in trapped-ion systems. Thanks DOE!
Rice News press release

Guido is awarded the Office of Naval Research YIP for the study of Open Quantum System with trapped ions. This program will focus on how the competition between engineered dissipation on phonon degrees of freedom and unitary spin dynamics open new exciting paths. Thanks ONR!

Our paper on Dissipative Floquet dynamics has been just published in Quantum!

After one year and half of very hard work and creative solutions to cope with the pandemic and all sorts of supply chain disruptions and delays, the trapped-ion team is happy to announce the first trapped ions in the state of Texas! In the left picture you can see four happy 171Yb+ atoms. On the right, we had fun setting radial and axial frequency very close, so that the ions are arranged in a nice “emoticon” configuration :). Thanks everyone! And now the real fun starts!

Guido has been awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER award to study entanglement and out-of-equilibrium physics in open quantum systems. Thanks NSF!

Rice Press release

In Many-body localized (MBL) systems disorder and interactions cooperate to create non-thermal state of matter. This means that, even if initialized in a high energy, out of equilibrium state, the system fails to reach thermodynamic equilibrium. Using the trapped-ion quantum simulator at JQI, we surprisingly find that MBL can be realized also in disorder-free systems featuring a very large gradient. A new phenomenon called Stark MBL.

• Observation of Stark many-body localization without disorder:
  W. Morong, F. Liu, P. Becker, K. S. Collins, L. Feng, A. Kyprianidis, G. Pagano, T. You, A. V. Gorshkov, C. Monroe, Nature 599, 393 (2021).
• Rice News Press Release

Before joining Rice, Midhuna Duraisamy Suganthi studied at the IIT of Madras, with an research internship at Purdue University working on BEC in momentum-space lattices. She will join the trapped-ion research effort. Welcome Midhuna!