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Journal of the Physical Society of Japan

Indirect Transverse Laser Cooling of Ions in a Linear Paul Trap

Hiroshi Sugimoto, H. Okamoto

Published Aug 10, 2010• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

A simple method of cooling the transverse motion of an ion cloud in a linear Paul trap with a single axial laser is proposed. Transverse thermal oscillations of ions are indirectly damped by the longitudinal laser friction via an additional radio-frequency potential that resonantly couples two degrees of freedom. The fundamental mechanism of the present cooling scheme is theoretically described with the help of a harmonic oscillator model. It is shown that the indirect cooling rate can be considerably enhanced when the frequencies of the transverse and longitudinal ion oscillations satisfy a certain relation. The validity of theoretical predictions is confirmed through molecular dynamics simulations in which the detailed three-dimensional configuration of a typical Paul trap is incorporated.

DOI
10.1143/jpsj.79.084501

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A simple method of cooling the transverse motion of an ion cloud in a linear Paul trap with a single axial laser is proposed. Transverse thermal oscillations of ions are indirectly damped by the longitudinal laser friction via an additional radio-frequency potential that resonantly couples two degrees of freedom. The fundamental mechanism of the present cooling scheme is theoretically described with the help of a harmonic oscillator model. It is shown that the indirect cooling rate can be considerably enhanced when the frequencies of the transverse and longitudinal ion oscillations satisfy a certain relation. The validity of theoretical predictions is confirmed through molecular dynamics simulations in which the detailed three-dimensional configuration of a typical Paul trap is incorporated.
A Coulomb crystal formed in a linear Paul trap by Doppler cooling with a single axial laser often shows undesired oscillatory behavior in the direction perpendicular to the trap axis. This transverse oscillation is found to include two distinct coherent motions; in addition to the well-known micromotion driven by external error fields, there exists another natural oscillatory component. The latter oscillation is a kind of statistical phenomenon that takes place even in the absence of any mechanical errors. A detailed theoretical study is performed to clarify the basic characteristics of these overlapping coherent motions. A simple cooling scheme is proposed to minimize the transverse oscillation amplitude of a Coulomb crystal without use of extra lasers. The validity of theoretical predictions made in the present paper is confirmed through molecular dynamics simulations assuming the three-dimensional electrode geometry of a typical Paul trap.
We analyze the possibility of cooling ions with a single laser beam, due to the coupling between the three components of their motion induced by the Coulomb interaction. For this purpose, we numerically study the dynamics of ion clouds of up to 140 particles, trapped in a linear quadrupole potential and cooled with a laser beam propagating in the radial plane. We use molecular dynamics simulations and model the laser cooling by a stochastic process. For each component of the motion, we systematically study the dependence of the temperature on the anisotropy of the trapping potential. Results obtained using the full radio-frequency (rf) potential are compared to those of the corresponding pseudopotential. In the rf case, the rotation symmetry of the potential has to be broken to keep ions inside the trap. Then, as for the pseudopotential case, we show that the efficiency of the Coulomb coupling to thermalize the components of motion depends on the geometrical configuration of the cloud. Coulomb coupling appears to be not efficient when the ions organize as a line or a pancake and the three components of motion reach the same temperature only if the cloud extends in three dimensions.
Sympathetic laser cooling of ions stored within a linear-geometry, radio frequency, electric-quadrupole trap has been investigated using computational and theoretical techniques. The simulation, which allows five sample ions to interact with 35 laser-cooled atomic ions, revealed an instability heating mechanism, which can prevent ions below a certain critical mass from being sympathetically cooled. This critical mass can, however, be varied by changing the trapping field parameters, thus allowing ions with a very large range of masses to be sympathetically cooled using a single ion species. A theoretical explanation of this instability heating mechanism is presented which predicts that the cooling-heating boundary in trapping parameter space is a line of constant qu{q}_{u}qu​ (ion trap stability coefficient), a result supported by the computational results. The threshold value of qu{q}_{u}qu​ depends on the masses of the interacting ions. A functional form of this dependence is given.
We report a study of the axialization and laser cooling of single ions and small clouds of ions in a Penning trap. A weak radiofrequency (rf) signal applied to a segmented ring electrode couples the magnetron motion to the cyclotron motion, which results in improved laser cooling of the magnetron motion. This allows us to approach the trapping conditions of a Paul trap, but without any micromotion. Using an ICCD camera we show that the motion of a single ion can be confined to dimensions of the order of 20 µm or less. We have measured increased magnetron cooling rates for clouds of a few ions, using an rf-photon correlation technique. For certain laser cooling conditions, the magnetron motion of the centre of mass of the cloud grows and stabilizes at a large value. This results in the ions orbiting the centre of the trap together in a small cloud, as confirmed by photon–photon correlation measurements.
Ion traps have been pivotal in opening new frontiers for the precision spectroscopy of stable ions. We report on the demonstration of an additional ion trap: the linear combined trap. This device is particularly well suited for trapping ions with unstable nuclei, due to its large range of stability parameters that facilitates external injection online to an accelerator. The motion of an ion in such a linear combined trap is investigated theoretically and experimentally. In the trap ions oscillate harmonically in the radial direction and move nearly harmonically between fixed boundaries along the longitudinal axis. The presence of a homogeneous magnetic field and the applied dc and rf electric fields, lead to a set of coupled Mathieu equations. Their approximate solutions exhibit motional frequencies, which are combinations of shifted macromotion frequencies and the cyclotron frequency. The dependence of these motional frequencies on the applied trapping fields was studied in detail. For the measurements we used small clouds of laser cooled B9e+ ions and crystallized B9e+ ions. The observed oscillation frequencies are compared to both the results of zeroth order analytical solutions and to numerical simulations in which the frequency spectrum was obtained from the ion orbits by using the fast fourier transform formalism. The various motional resonances were experimentally recorded by applying a weak dipole excitation field to one of the trap electrodes, and by simultaneously observing at resonance the changes in the fluorescence intensity. Depending on the detuning of the cooling laser the ions gain energy during the motional excitation process in such a way that they are shifted further in or out of optical resonance by the Doppler effect. This leads to either positive or negative ion motion signals at the various ion oscillation frequencies.
The accurate evaluation of the second-order Doppler frequency shift (SODFS) of trapped ions in a linear Paul trap has been studied with experiments and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The motion of trapped ions in the trap has three contributions, and we focus on the ion excess micromotion, which is rarely discussed when evaluating the SODFS of ions. Based on the hypothesis that the ion density is uniformly distributed in the radial direction, we propose a model to accurately evaluate the total SODFS for an ion ensemble with temperature less than 100 mK, which consists of three contributions of ion motion. The effectiveness of the model has been verified by MD simulation, and the experimental results of the excess micromotion of trapped ions are consistent with the theory. We believe that our model offers advantages in accurately evaluating the SODFS for the ion trap, especially those of laser-cooled ion microwave clocks based on large ion clouds.