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Physical Review Letters

Evaporative Cooling and Coherent Axial Oscillations of Highly Charged Ions in a Penning Trap

M. Hobein, A. Solders, M. Suhonen, Y. Liu, R. Schuch

Published Jan 7, 2011• 33 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Externally, in an electron beam ion trap, generated Ar16+ ions were retrapped in a Penning trap and evaporatively cooled in their axial motion. The cooling was observed by a novel extraction technique based on the excitation of a coherent axial oscillation which yields short ion bunches of well-defined energies. The initial temperature of the ion cloud was decreased by a factor of more than 140 within 1 s, while the phase-space density of the coldest extracted ion pulses was increased by a factor of up to about 9.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.106.013002

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Externally, in an electron beam ion trap, generated Ar16+ ions were retrapped in a Penning trap and evaporatively cooled in their axial motion. The cooling was observed by a novel extraction technique based on the excitation of a coherent axial oscillation which yields short ion bunches of well-defined energies. The initial temperature of the ion cloud was decreased by a factor of more than 140 within 1 s, while the phase-space density of the coldest extracted ion pulses was increased by a factor of up to about 9.
We have performed systematic measurements of the resistive cooling behavior of bunches of highly charged ions in a Penning trap after injection from an external source. In particular, we have been able to measure the exponential cooling rate of the axial center-of-mass motion and experimentally show its linear dependence on the ion number within the bunch, as expected from theory. The common center-of-mass energy of the ions is reduced by more than four orders of magnitude on the time scale of milliseconds while the single-ion cooling occurs on the scale of seconds, representing a highly effective way to remove the dominating part of the ion kinetic energy. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We recently used a compact Penning trap to capture and isolate highly charged ions extracted from an electron beam ion trap (EBIT) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Isolated charge states of highly stripped argon and neon ions with total charge $Q\ensuremath{\ge}10$, extracted at energies of up to $4\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{3}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}Q$ eV, are captured in a trap with well depths of $\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\approx}(4--12)Q$ eV. Here we discuss in detail the process to optimize velocity tuning, capture, and storage of highly charged ions in a unitary Penning trap designed to provide easy radial access for atomic or laser beams in charge exchange or spectroscopic experiments, such as those of interest for proposed studies of one-electron ions in Rydberg states or optical transitions of metastable states in multiply charged ions. Under near-optimal conditions, ions captured and isolated in such rare-earth Penning traps can be characterized by an initial energy distribution that is $\ensuremath{\approx}60$ times narrower than typically found in an EBIT. This reduction in thermal energy is obtained passively, without the application of any active cooling scheme in the ion-capture trap.
We propose the application of pulsed evaporative cooling, which has been used successfully for Bose-Einstein condensation of neutral atoms, to highly charged ions. Practically, this cooling technique can be highly efficient and favorable for ions in an electron beam ion trap (EBIT). By computer simulation, we have numerically estimated the performance of this cooling scheme on the basis of the standard evaporation theory. The result is very promising; from the initial temperature of 500 eV, Kr +30 can be cooled to room temperature within a few seconds.
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.