Experimental Realization of Thermal Reservoirs with Tunable Temperature in a Trapped-Ion Spin-Boson Simulator

We propose and demonstrate an experimental scheme to engineer thermal baths with tunable temperatures for the motional modes of a trapped-ion system. This approach enables robust thermal-state preparation and quantum simulations of open-system dynamics in bosonic and spin-boson models at well-controlled finite temperatures. We benchmark our protocol by experimentally realizing out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a charge-transfer model at different temperatures. We observe that, when the process occurs at a higher temperature, the transfer rate spectrum broadens, with reduced rates at small donor-acceptor energy gaps and enhanced rates at large gaps. We then employ our scheme to study local-temperature effects in a two-mode vibrationally assisted exciton transfer system, where we observe thermally activated interference pathways for excitation transfer.