Accessing the non-equal-time commutators of a trapped ion

Abstract

The vibronic dynamics of a trapped ion in the resolved-sideband regime can be described by the explicitly time-dependent nonlinear Jaynes-Cummings model. It is shown that the expectation value of the interaction Hamiltonian and its non-equal-time commutator can be determined by measuring the electronic-state evolution. This yields direct insight into the time-ordering contributions to the unitary time evolution. In order to prove extraction of the quantities of interest works for possibly real data, we demonstrate the procedure by means of generated data.