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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Quantum analysis of atom-ion sympathetic cooling in the presence of micromotion

Michał Krych, Zbigniew Idziaszek

Published Dec 1, 2013• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

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 100$\mu$K for parameters of present experiments.

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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.
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.
Abstract Sympathetic cooling of a Fermi gas with a buffer gas of bosonic atoms is an efficient way to achieve quantum degeneracy in Fermi systems. However, all attempts to use this method for cooling ions until recently were ineffective because of the unremovable ion “micromotion” in electromagnetic Paul traps, which prevents the realization of a number of hot projects with cold atom-ion systems. In this regard, we propose a new efficient method for sympathetic cooling of ions: the use for this purpose of cold buffer atoms in the region of atom-ion confinement-induced resonances (CIRs) [V.S. Melezhik, Phys. Rev. A103, 53109 (2021)]. We show that the destructive effect of “micromotion” on its sympathetic cooling can, however, be suppressed in the vicinity of the atom-ion CIR. Here, the resonant blocking of a close collision of an atom with an ion also resists its heating due to “micromotion”. We investigate the effect of sympathetic cooling around CIRs in atom-ion, and atom-atom confined collisions within the quantum-quasiclassical approach using the Li–Yb+ and Li–Yb confined systems as an example. In this approach, the Schrödinger equation for a cold light atom is integrated simultaneously with the classical Hamilton equations for a hotter heavy-ion or atom during a collision. We have found the region near the atom-ion CIR where the sympathetic cooling of the ion by cold atoms is possible in a hybrid atom-ion trap. We also show that it is possible to improve the efficiency of sympathetic cooling in atomic traps by using atomic CIRs.
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).
We develop the theory describing the quantum coupled dynamics of the center-of-mass motion of a nanoparticle and an ensemble of ions co-trapped in a dual-frequency linear Paul trap. We first derive analytical expressions for the motional frequencies and classical trajectories of both nanoparticle and ions. We then derive a quantum master equation for the ion-nanoparticle system and quantify the sympathetic cooling of the nanoparticle motion enabled by its Coulomb coupling to a continuously Doppler-cooled ion. We predict that motional cooling down to sub-kelvin temperatures is achievable in state-of-the-art experiments even in the absence of motional feedback and in the presence of micromotion. We then extend our analysis to an ensemble of NNN ions, predicting a linear increase of the cooling rate as a function of NNN and motional cooling of the nanoparticle down to tenths of millikelvin in current experimental platforms. Our work establishes the theoretical toolbox needed to explore the ion-assisted preparation of non-Gaussian motional states of levitated nanoparticles.