Control over individually trapped ions has developed rapidly in recent years. Thanks to their unmatched coherence properties, and long-range coupling via the Coulomb interaction, they have become a versatile platform employed for a large variety of experimental goals. Here we apply these new capabilities to study Boson hopping dynamics using selectively prepared single phonons in the local modes of motion of individual ions. Each ion additionally carries a spin degree of freedom which can be coupled to the motion. This gives rise to polaritonic states which change the dynamics of the system in a controllable way. We observe this phenomenon in a chain of three ions by creating a phonon blockade [1]. This is the first step towards opening up a wide range of quantum effects to be studied, including many-body Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard model dynamics which are difficult to simulate on a classical computer.

[1] S. Debnath, N.M. Linke, S.-T. Wang, C. Figgatt, K.A. Landsman, L.-M. Duan, C. Monroe, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 073001 (2018).

Note: There will be snacks and drinks at 4:00 and the talk is from 4:10 to 4:40