Coherent squeezed states of motion in an ion trap generated with Raman-driven sideband transitions

Raman interaction between two internal levels and its sideband cooling of a trapped ion or atom are investigated in copropagating traveling-wave light fields for localization beyond the Lamb-Dicke limit. Under certain conditions, only the first-order sideband excitations (n→n±1 with n being a Fock state) may play a significant role. This provides an experimental realization of the Jaynes-Cummings model with quantized center-of-mass motion beyond the Lamb-Dicke regime, which can be used to measure the statistics of the quantized motion, and thus to detect nonclassical states of motion. Moreover, the multichromatic two-photon Raman excitations of the trapped particle can be used for the preparation of coherent squeezed states of motion.