Tomography of entangled massive particles

Abstract

We report on tomographic means to study the stability of a qubit register based on a string of trapped ions. In our experiment, two ions are held in a linear Paul trap and are entangled deterministically by laser pulses that couple their electronic and motional states. We reconstruct the density matrix using single qubit rotations and subsequent measurements with near-unity detection efficiency. This way, we characterize the created Bell states, the states into which they subsequently decay, and we derive their entanglement, applying different entanglement measures.