Novel Applications and Noise-enabled Control for a Trapped-ion Quantum Simulator

Trapped atomic ions are a highly versatile platform for quantum simulation and computation. In this talk, I will provide a brief description of the quantum control that enables both analog and digital modes of quantum simulation on this platform before reporting on two recent results: a digital quantum simulation that measured the first out-of-time-order correlators in a thermal system, and an analog simulation of particles with exotic statistics. In the last part of my talk, I will describe future plans and early work on harnessing yet-unused atomic and phononic resources to build a noise-enabled quantum simulator targeting the intersection between quantum devices and their environments.