Abstract
We demonstrate that the recently observed damping of Rabi oscillations of a trapped ion initially cooled to its motional ground state [Meekhof et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 1796 (1996)] is caused by quantum jumps to an auxiliary electronic state. This mechanism also predicts an asymmetric decay of the electronic-state population that is found to be in good agreement with the measured data.
- Received 12 May 2000
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.62.031802
©2000 American Physical Society