2026/07/24 by Marcel Morillas-Rozas, Alberto López-García, Enamul Haque +2
#quant-ph
Conventional laser control schemes for cooling and gate operation of trapped ions are limited to the regime of weak laser intensities and small Lamb-Dicke parameters. To overcome this limitation, we present the concept of dark polarons: spatially extended states of pseudospin polarization that are fully decoupled from a lambda laser configuration. In this picture, all high-order Lamb-Dicke terms collapse into a single linear coupling independent of laser intensity. We apply it to definitively elucidate the reasons behind cooling rate limitations observed in recent experimental implementations of electromagnetically induced transparency with high-intensity lasers.