Engineering steady entanglement for trapped ions at finite temperature by dissipation

Abstract: We propose a dissipative method for preparation of a maximally entangled steady state of two trapped ions in the Lamb-Dicke limit. By addressing the trapped-ion system with a monochromatic standing wave laser pulse of frequency resonant with the ionic transition and a microwave field coupled to the ground-state transitions, we obtain an effective coupling between two particles, which is independent of the phonon-number fluctuations. Meanwhile, the controlled spontaneous emission of trapped ions is implemented via pumping the metastable states upwards to the short-lived ionic states by an auxiliary laser field. Combining the unitary processes with the engineered dissipation, a deterministic Bell state can be produced irrespective of the initial states of systems. Moreover, our result shows that the CHSH inequality can be violated for a wide range of decoherence parameters, even at finite temperature.