Quantum jumps were first theorized in 1913 by Niels Bohr in his theory of the hydrogen atom, but it wasn’t’ until 1986 that they were observed experimentally by Hans Dehmelt’s group at University of Washington. In the experiment, the jumps manifested themselves as instantaneous transitions of a single trapped, laser-cooled ion from the “bright” state to the “dark” state as measured by a photon-counting detector. More recent observations of quantum jumps in artificial atoms built from superconducting circuits allowed the researchers at Yale to “catch” and “reverse” the jumps in an experiment that was enabled by the fact that nearly every single photon emitted by the superconducting qubit was detected. We plan to achieve a similar level of single photon detection from a single trapped ion using a novel ion trap that incorporates a deep parabolic mirror covering more than 95% of the solid angle around the ion. This will enable observation of the quantum jumps at the nanosecond time scale, limited only by the scattering rate of the laser light by the ion, in a system that is free from dissipation, with the possibility to track and control the dynamics of the wave function collapse.