Toward dissipation driven many-body ground state preparation with trapped ions

The preparation of the ground state of an interacting many-body system is often challenging to calculate or achieve experimentally. Existing coherent protocols, such as adiabatic state preparation, suffer from the existence of critical energy gaps in the many-body spectrum. Controlled dissipation on a subsystem acting as a 'reservoir' provides a new tool to drive the quantum state of a strongly coupled 'system' toward unexplored quantum states. Such reservoir engineering in a trapped ion quantum simulator with long-range interactions offers a promising testbed for studying complex many-body states. Here, we share our results on steering a subsystem of a chain of interacting 171Yb+ spins towards its ground state. This is accomplished through carefully engineered dissipation on the reservoir ions, which interact strongly with our system ions. Our dissipation on the reservoir is mediated by site-selective, low-crosstalk state reset facilitated by holographic beam shaping of optical pumping laser beams. These findings showcase a pathway towards understanding the dynamics of dissipation-driven entangled states using trapped ions.