Entanglement generation and excitation transport in dissipative trapped ion chains.

Trapped ion platforms offer a high degree of coherent control making them an ideal platform for generating entangled states that can be further utilized for quantum simulation or quantum metrology purposes. It is well known, however, that coherent entanglement generation is fragile with respect to noise and dissipation making it challenging to keep the entangled states protected from decoherence. Recently [1,2], it has been proposed that one could take advantage of those dissipative channels to prepare a more robust steady-state entanglement. Here, we explore the dynamics of an ion chain composed of logical and auxiliary qubits, the latter used to cool the motional modes of the chain. Depending on the location of the qubits in the chain, this platform can be used to study the generation of highly entangled spin states or to study long-range transport of spin excitations along the chain, extending the results on [3] and [4], respectively. We show that different regimes of these phenomena can be achieved by tuning the relative strengths of the three relevant energy scales of the model: the spin-spin interactions, the spin-phonon coupling, and the cooling rate of the motional modes.



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