Scheme for Direct Measurement of Wigner Characteristic Function for Motion of a Single Trapped Ion

In this paper, a procedure is proposed for measuring Wigner characteristic function for motion of a single trapped ion. In the scheme, the trapped ion is driven by two laser beams with different frequencies tuned to the first lower and upper vibrational sidebands, respectively. Unlike other previous scheme, our scheme does not require the displacement of the external state before the ion-laser interaction and thus our scheme might be more simple and feasible. The scheme can also be used to prepare the motional Schr(o)dinger cat states and entangled coherent states.