Trapped ions offers the capability to study the real-time dynamics of a spin system in contact with a engineered bath. Reservoir engineering opens completely new avenues to quantum simulations, unlocking the access to the direct simulation of chemical reactions [1] and biological processes [2,3]. The simulation of these processes requires the coupling between the system and a structured environment to be included in the quantum simulator toolbox. In this approach the electronic degree of freedom is encoded in the long-lived atomic states and the molecular vibrations in collective modes of motion stemming from Coulomb interaction among the ions. In order to engineer a structured bath we will employ selective ground state cooling on sacrifical ions and on specific normal modes [4]. Importantly, the direct trapped-ion realization of the spin-boson model allows one to naturally extend the modeling of electron transfer to the realm of lower temperatures to study the effect of quantum mechanics and tunneling, where many questions on molecular electron transfer remain open [5,6].

References:
[1] A. Garg, et al., The Journal of Chemical Physics 83, 4491 (1985).
[2] D. Xu and K. Schulten, Chemical Physics 182, 91 (1994).
[3] A. W. Chin, et al., Nature Physics 9, 113 (2013).
[4] A. Lemmer, et al., New Journal of Physics 20, 073002 (2018).
[5] D. Devault, Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics 13, 387 (1980).
[6] R. Zhuravel, et al., Nature Nanotechnology 15, 836 (2020).