Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulation of Generalized Electron Transfer Models

The properties of trapped ions make them a pristine platform for the analog quantum simulation of spin-boson models, where the spins and bosons can readily be encoded in the internal states of the ions and their collective vibrational modes, respectively. In [1], we use trapped ions to study a minimal spin-boson model, which describes the electron transfer process between two molecular sites coupled to a dissipative vibrational mode. Here, we report the realization of the electron transfer models with more than one dissipative vibrational mode in the strong electronic coupling regime, where we observe enhancements in the transfer rate. Building on these works, we propose dissipation-driven protocols [2] for generating N-qubit and N-boson W states as well as generic N-qubit Dicke states with tunable excitation numbers on the trapped ion system through the generalized electron transfer models involving multiple molecular sites and vibrational modes.

[1] Visal So et al., Sci. Adv. 10, eads8011 (2024)

[2] Mingjian Zhu et al., in preparation (2025)