Coherent control of a local phonon in trapped ions using dynamical decoupling

In this paper, we present a dynamical decoupling (DD) technique to coherently control the dynamics of a single local phonon in trapped ions. A 2$\pi$ rotation at a motional sideband transition flips the sign of the relevant local phonon state, resulting in cancellation of the phonon dynamics. In this work, we implement DD using single and multiple blue-sideband pulses to control a single local phonon in two $^{40}{\rm Ca}^{+}$ ions in a linear Paul trap. Our proposed DD technique can be used to engineer coupling between local phonon modes.