March 14, 2024
Through simulations and experiments we compare two ways of sideband cooling to the ground state: pulsed and continuous. Our findings show that when optimized the two sideband cooling methods perform similarly in preparing the ground state, with pulsed cooling having a slight advantage when cooling on higher order sidebands. We also discuss how the commonly used method of measuring the ion temperature, the sideband ratio method, does not provide an accurate measurement of the average phonon number and in some cases may even be wrong by close to an order of magnitude. Read more about it here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04891