Trapped-ion quantum platforms are subject to `anomalous' heating due to interactions with electric-field noise sources of nature not yet completely known. There is ample experimental evidence that this noise originates at the surfaces of the trap electrodes, and models assuming fluctuating point-like dipoles are consistent with observations, but the exact microscopic mechanisms behind anomalous heating remain undetermined. Here we show how a two-ion probe displays a transition in its dissipation properties, enabling experimental access to the mean orientation of the dipoles and the spatial extent of dipole-dipole correlations. This information can be used to test the validity of candidate microscopic models, which predict correlation lengths spanning several orders of mag- nitude. Furthermore, we propose an experiment to measure these effects with currently-available traps and techniques.
@article{arxiv.1703.09657,
title = {Multi-ion sensing of dipolar noise sources in ion traps},
author = {F. Galve and J. Alonso and R. Zambrini},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.09657},
year = {2017}
}