Measurement-induced heating of a trapped ion

Abstract

We experimentally study the heating of trapped atomic ions during measurement of their internal qubit states. During measurement, ions are projected into one of two basis states and discriminated by their state-dependent fluorescence. We observe that ions in the fluorescing state rapidly scatter photons and heat at a rate of n ¯ ˙ ≳ 2 × 10 4 quanta s−1, which is orders of magnitude faster than typical anomalous ion heating rates. We introduce a quantum trajectory-based framework that accurately reproduces the experimental results and provides a unified description of ion heating for both continuous and discrete sources.