Measurement-Induced Heating of Trapped Ions

We experimentally study the heating of trapped atomic ions during measurement of their internal qubit states. During measurement, ions are projected into one of two basis states and discriminated by their state-dependent fluorescence. We observe that ions in the fluorescing state rapidly scatter photons and heat at a rate of n̄~ 2× 10⁴ quanta/s, which is ~ 30 times faster than the anomalous ion heating rate. We introduce a quantum trajectory-based framework that accurately reproduces the experimental results and provides a unified description of ion heating for both continuous and discrete sources.