Confining an ion in a surface electrode ion trap

Da An, Clemens Matthiesen, Ahmed Abdelrahman +5 more

We describe the design, fabrication, and operation of a novel surface-electrode Paul trap that produces a radio-frequency-null along the axis perpendicular to the trap surface. This arrangement enables control of the vertical trapping potential and consequentially the ion-electrode distance via dc-electrodes only. We demonstrate the confinement of single 40Ca+ ions at heights between 50 μm and 300 μm above planar copper-coated aluminum electrodes. Laser-cooling and coherent operations are performed on both the planar and vertical motional modes. This architecture provides a platform for precision electric-field noise detection and trapping of vertical ion strings without excess micromotion and may have applications for scalable quantum computers with surface ion traps.

Timur Abbasov, Sergei A. Zibrov, I. Sherstov

L. Chen, Wei Wan, Yi Xie +3 more

40 Ca + ions are successfully confined, under the cooling of a red-detuned laser, in a home-built microscopic surface-electrode (MSE) trap. With all electrodes deposited on a low-rf-loss substrate, our 500-μm-scale MSE trap is designed involving three potential wells and manufactured by the standard technique of the printed circuit board. Both linear and two-dimensional crystals of 40 Ca + are observed in the trap after preliminary micromotion compensation is carried out. The development of the MSE trap aims at large-scale trapped-ion quantum information processing.

Susanna Todaro, D. H. Slichter, David J. Wineland +2 more

Xiaoyang Shi, Susanna Todaro, Gabriel Mintzer +3 more

Trapped-ion quantum information processing may benefit from qubits encoded in isotopes that are practically available in only small quantities, e.g., due to low natural abundance or radioactivity. Laser ablation provides a method of controllably liberating neutral atoms or ions from low-volume targets, but energetic ablation products can be difficult to confine in the small ion-electrode distance, micron-scale microfabricated traps amenable to high-speed, high-fidelity manipulation of ion arrays. Here, we investigate ablation-based ion loading into surface-electrode traps of different sizes to test a model describing ion loading probability as a function of effective trap volume and other trap parameters. We characterize loading of ablated barium from a metallic source in two cryogenic surface-electrode traps with 730 and 50 μm ion-electrode distances. Our loading rate agrees with a predictive analytical model, providing insight for the confinement of limited-quantity species of interest for quantum computing, simulation, and sensing.

Noriaki Horiuchi