Indirect Cooling of Weakly Coupled Trapped-Ion Mechanical Oscillators

Cooling the motion of trapped ions to near the quantum ground state is crucial for many applications in quantum information processing and quantum metrology. However, certain motional modes of trapped-ion crystals can be difficult to cool due to weak or zero interaction between the modes and the cooling radiation, typically laser beams. We overcome this challenge by coupling a mode that interacts weakly with cooling radiation to one that interacts strongly with cooling radiation using parametric modulation of the trapping potential, thereby enabling indirect cooling of the weakly interacting mode. In this way, we demonstrate near-ground-state cooling of motional modes with weak or zero cooling radiation interaction in multi-ion crystals of the same and mixed ion species, specifically Be + 9 − Be + 9 , Be + 9 − Mg + 25 , and Be + 9 − Mg + 25 − Be + 9 crystals. This approach can be generally applied to any Coulomb crystal where certain motional modes cannot be directly cooled efficiently, including crystals containing molecular ions, highly charged ions, charged fundamental particles, or charged macroscopic objects.