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arXiv:1312.0279 · Physical Review A

Description of ion motion in a Paul trap immersed in a cold atomic gas

Michał Krych, Zbigniew Idziaszek

Published Feb 25, 2015• 49 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the problem of a single ion in a radio-frequency trap immersed in an ultracold Bose gas in either a condensed or a noncondensed phase. We develop a master-equation formalism describing the sympathetic cooling, and we determine the cooling rates of ions. We show that the cold atomic reservoir modifies the stability diagram of the ion in the Paul trap, creating regions where the ion is either cooled or heated due to the energy quanta exchanged with the time-dependent potential.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.91.023430

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We investigate the problem of a single ion in a radio-frequency trap immersed in an ultracold Bose gas in either a condensed or a noncondensed phase. We develop a master-equation formalism describing the sympathetic cooling, and we determine the cooling rates of ions. We show that the cold atomic reservoir modifies the stability diagram of the ion in the Paul trap, creating regions where the ion is either cooled or heated due to the energy quanta exchanged with the time-dependent potential.
We investigate the problem of a single ion in a radio-frequency trap and immersed in an ultracold Bose gas either in condensed or non-condensed phase. We develop master equation formalism describing the sympathetic cooling and we determine the cooling rates and final energies of ions. We show that cold atomic reservoir modifies the stability diagram of the ion in the Paul trap creating the regions where the ion is either cooled or heated due to the energy quanta exchanged with the time-dependent potential. Our calculation indicates that micromotion constitutes an important source of heating limiting the final temperature of ions to values higher than 100μ\muμK for parameters of present experiments.
We present, and derive analytic expressions for, a fundamental limit to the sympathetic cooling of ions in radio-frequency traps using cold atoms. The limit arises from the work done by the trap electric field during a long-range ion-atom collision and applies even to cooling by a zero-temperature atomic gas in a perfectly compensated trap. We conclude that in current experimental implementations, this collisional heating prevents access to the regimes of single-partial-wave atom-ion interaction or quantized ion motion. We determine conditions on the atom-ion mass ratio and on the trap parameters for reaching the s-wave collision regime and the trap ground state.
We provide a comprehensive theoretical framework for describing the dynamics of a single trapped ion interacting with a neutral buffer gas, thus extending our previous studies on buffer-gas cooling of ions beyond the critical mass ratio [B. H\"oltkemeier et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 233003 (2016)]. By transforming the collisional processes into a frame, where the ion's micromotion is assigned to the buffer-gas atoms, our model allows us to investigate the influence of nonhomogeneous buffer-gas configurations as well as higher multipole orders of the radio-frequency trap in great detail. Depending on the neutral-to-ion mass ratio, three regimes of sympathetic cooling are identified which are characterized by the form of the ion's energy distribution in equilibrium. We provide analytic expressions and numerical simulations of the ion's energy distribution, spatial profile, and cooling rates for these different regimes. Based on these findings, a method for actively decreasing the ion's energy by reducing the spatial expansion of the buffer gas arises (forced sympathetic cooling).
Abstract Reaching ultracold temperatures within hybrid atom–ion systems is a major limiting factor for control and exploration of the atom–ion interaction in the quantum regime. In this work, we present results on numerical simulations of trapped ion buffer gas cooling using an ultracold atomic gas in a large number of experimentally realistic scenarios. We explore the suppression of micromotion-induced heating effects through optimization of trap parameters for various radio-frequency (rf) traps and rf driving schemes including linear and octupole traps, digital Paul traps, rotating traps and hybrid optical/rf traps. We find that very similar ion energies can be reached in all of them even when considering experimental imperfections that cause so-called excess micromotion. Moreover we look into a quantum description of the system and show that quantum mechanics cannot save the ion from micromotion-induced heating in an atom–ion collision. The results suggest that buffer gas cooling can be used to reach close to the ion’s groundstate of motion and is even competitive when compared to some sub-Doppler cooling techniques such as Sisyphus cooling. Thus, buffer gas cooling is a viable alternative for ions that are not amenable to laser cooling, a result that may be of interest for studies into cold controlled quantum chemistry and charged impurity physics.
Sympathetic cooling is the process of energy exchange between a system and a colder bath. We investigate this fundamental process in an atom-ion experiment where the system is composed of a single ion trapped in a radio-frequency Paul trap and prepared in a classical oscillatory motion with total energy of ∼200 K, and the bath is an ultracold cloud of atoms at μK temperature. We directly observe the sympathetic cooling dynamics with single-shot energy measurements during one to several collisions in two distinct regimes. In one, collisions predominantly cool the system with very efficient momentum transfer leading to cooling in only a few collisions. In the other, collisions can both cool and heat the system due to nonequilibrium dynamics in the presence of the ion trap's oscillating electric fields. While the bulk of our observations agree well with a molecular-dynamics simulation of hard-sphere (Langevin) collisions, a measurement of the scattering angle distribution reveals forward-scattering (glancing) collisions which are beyond the Langevin model. This work paves the way for further nonequilibrium and collision dynamics studies using the well-controlled atom-ion system.
A single ion immersed in a neutral buffer gas is studied. An analytical model is developed that gives a complete description of the dynamics and steady-state properties of the ions. An extension of this model, using techniques employed in the mathematics of economics and finance, is used to explain the recent observation of non-Maxwellian statistics for these systems. Taken together, these results offer an explanation of the long-standing issues associated with sympathetic cooling of an ion by a neutral buffer gas.