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Updated: Feb 15, 2026

Experimental Methods for Trapping Ions Using Microfabricated Surface Ion Traps
Published on: August 17, 2017
Experimental quantum simulation of fermion-antifermion scattering via boson exchange in a trapped ion
Xiang Zhang1,2, Kuan Zhang1, Yangchao Shen1
1Center for Quantum Information, Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
Abstract:
Quantum field theories describe a variety of fundamental phenomena in physics. However, their study often involves cumbersome numerical simulations. Quantum simulators, on the other hand, may outperform classical computational capacities due to their potential scalability. Here we report an experimental realization of a quantum simulation of fermion-antifermion scattering mediated by bosonic modes, using a multilevel trapped ion, which is a simplified model of fermion scattering in both perturbative and non-perturbative quantum electrodynamics. The simulated model exhibits prototypical features in quantum field theory including particle pair creation and annihilation, as well as self-energy interactions. These are experimentally observed by manipulating four internal levels of a 171Yb+ trapped ion, where we encode the fermionic modes, and two motional degrees of freedom that simulate the bosonic modes. Our experiment establishes an avenue towards the efficient implementation of field modes, which may prove useful in studies of quantum field theories including non-perturbative regimes.
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