Ph.D. Thesis - Physics
Ph.D. Thesis - Physics
Ph.D. Thesis - Physics
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1.6 Contributions to this work<br />
In this section we present the main contributions of the author and his coworkers to this<br />
thesis, and then list the publications that have resulted from this work.<br />
1.6.1 Personal contributions<br />
In Part I, I participated in all aspects of the experiment and theoretical modeling. I wrote<br />
many of the pulse sequences and experimental automation, as well as analyzing the exper-<br />
imental results. I also wrote many of the simulation programs that predicted the results of<br />
the quantum simulation, and helped to pinpoint the sources of divergence between them,<br />
including the systematic error. A great deal of work that does not appear in this thesis,<br />
such as quantum state tomography to diagnose the sources of decoherence, was also done<br />
by me.<br />
In Part II, I contributed a variety of work. In the experimental work of Ch. 5, I led the<br />
investigation of atomic ions in the lattice trap. I built the vacuum chamber and ion trap in<br />
which measurements were taken. I also discovered the poor scaling properties of the lattice<br />
trap. I worked with my coauthors to analyze the data, particularly the macroion repulsion<br />
data. In the experiments which are described in Ch. 6, my primary contribution was the<br />
collection of a large quantity of data for both of the resulting publications. I also helped<br />
build the vacuum apparatus and prepare the traps for the ablation experiment and set up<br />
the ablation targets and laser. For the work of Ch. 7, I designed and had manufactured the<br />
elliptical ion traps, set up a new cryogenic vacuum system for testing them, performed all the<br />
measurements on them, and drove the theoretical side of the project as well by suggesting<br />
problems I thought important to my undergraduate coworkers. I also contributed to writing<br />
and debugging many of the simulation codes.<br />
Part III represents a collaboration between the Chuang group at MIT and the Blatt<br />
group at the Institut für Quantenoptik und Quanteninformation (IQOQI), located at the<br />
University of Innsbruck, Austria. I worked about eight months in total at the IQOQI on the<br />
experiment. While I was there, some specific things I accomplished were: completing the<br />
setup of the vacuum system, including feedthroughs and calcium oven; the first trapping<br />
of ions using a trap brought from MIT; electronics including filter boxes, the rf resonator,<br />
and putting together the pulse programmer; preparing the Doppler recooling technique<br />
and using it to measure the heating rate of a single ion; and making the first systematic<br />
observations of the variation in trap frequency and compensation voltages as a function of<br />
the ion-wire distance. While back at MIT, I also contributed much to the analysis of new<br />
data.<br />
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