Localization of phonons in ion traps with controlled quantum disorder

Abstract

We show that the vibrations of a chain of trapped ions offer an interesting route to explore the physics of disordered quantum systems. By preparing the internal state of the ions in a quantum superposition, we show how the local vibrational energy becomes a stochastic variable, being its statistical properties inherited from the underlying quantum parallelism of the internal state. We describe a minimally-perturbing measurement of the resonance fluorescence, which allows us to study effects like Anderson localization without the need of ground-state cooling or individual addressing, and thus paves the way towards high-temperature ion experiments.