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Design of a modular miniaturized apparatus for ion trapping

Petr Jedlička

Published Jan 1, 2023• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We are developing a new experimental apparatus for laser cooling of trapped ions, focusing on high electric field homogeneity, modularity and small size. The apparatus allows measurements with Coulomb crystals and easy modification for different experiments. The high homogeneity trap is created by electrospinning, while the modularity allows for the exchange of key parts. By miniaturizing the dimensions, we achieve a larger numerical aperture of the lens and a reduction in the size of the magnetic shielding. This portable apparatus offers new possibilities for ion studies and is promising for applications in satellite systems and reconnaissance satellites.

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•Jan 1, 2007•3 citations
We are developing a new experimental apparatus for laser cooling of trapped ions, focusing on high electric field homogeneity, modularity and small size. The apparatus allows measurements with Coulomb crystals and easy modification for different experiments. The high homogeneity trap is created by electrospinning, while the modularity allows for the exchange of key parts. By miniaturizing the dimensions, we achieve a larger numerical aperture of the lens and a reduction in the size of the magnetic shielding. This portable apparatus offers new possibilities for ion studies and is promising for applications in satellite systems and reconnaissance satellites.
We present a design of a new compact vacuum chamber with an electrical trap for trapping and laser cooling of 40Ca+ and 27Al+ ions. The custom chamber was designed to a minimum dimension to achieve ultra-high vacuum environment and good optical access to trapped ions. Combining the shape of the electrical trap with intrinsic geometrical symmetry and the size of the viewports will allow maximum efficiency of fluorescence collection from ions. The setup is ready for ablation and loading of 40Ca+ and 27Al+ ions to deal with quantum logic experiments for optical clock operation. In combination with magnetic saddle coils, Helmholtz coil and external magnetic shielding made of mu-metal, we achieve a very homogeneous magnetic field in the ion trapping area. The main part of a chamber equipped with viewports is made of titanium to maintain this homogeneous magnetic field and suppress residual fields. The presented setup will allow quantum experiments with single ions and Coulomb crystals in a stable and homogeneous magnetic field, which is necessary for many-ions optical clock systems.
We report on development of a miniature linear rf ion trap and preliminary efforts to trap and laser-cool {sup 24}Mg{sup +} ions. This trap has a radial dimension of 50 {mu}m, one tenth the size of our previous trap. The rms confinement of a trapped ion scales as R{sup -2}, where R is the trap radius, so tight confinement of ions is possible at a modest rf voltage. Although the three-dimensional trapping potential for our trap cannot be calculated analytically, it can be described in terms of dimensionless parameters, measured by studying macroscopic charged particles in a much larger model of the trap. We expect that with this trap it will be possible to achieve secular frequencies high enough for resolved-sideband cooling of light ions using allowed dipole transitions. This will make it much easier to perform experiments on the quantum motion of trapped ions. This trap uses a two-wire design rather than the more common four-wire one, so the trap electrodes occlude a much smaller solid angle than either a four-wire linear trap or the more common quadrupole trap. Thus, it will be possible to couple optical devices, such as high-finesse cavities, much more efficiently to trapped ions.
SummaryWe present our arrangement of new apparatus for trapping Ca+and Al+ions. The apparatus consists of a compact vacuum chamber, linear quadrupole trap, one pair of Helmholtz coils, two pairs of saddle coils, and a magnetic shield. The new design respects the requirement of the large optical access for laser beam integration, a homogeneous magnetic field in the position of the ion in the trapping area, and an ultra-high vacuum regime to avoid interactions between residual gas and ions. The new apparatus is designed in a way so that all important subparts can be changed easily and allow us to minimize the time when the inner parts are exposed to the air during a component exchange. All parts of the arrangement, including the quadrupole trap, have been designed and developed by the Institute of Scientific Instruments in Brno, Czech Republic.
While the linear radiofrequency trap finds various applications in high-precision spectroscopy and quantum information, its higher-order cousin, the linear multipole trap, is almost exclusively employed in physical chemistry. Recently, first experiments have shown interesting features by laser-cooling multipole-trapped ion clouds. Multipole traps show a flatter potential in their centre and therefore a modified density distribution compared to quadrupole traps. Micromotion is an important issue and will certainly influence the dynamics of crystallized ion structures. Our experiment tends to investigate possible crystallization processes in the multipole. In a more general way, we are interested in the study of the dynamics and thermodynamics of large ion clouds in traps of different geometry.
The electromagnetic manipulation of isolated ions has led to many advances in atomic physics, from laser cooling to precision metrology and quantum control. As technical capability in this area has grown, so has interest in building miniature electromagnetic traps for the development of large-scale quantum information processors. This thesis will primarily focus on using microfabrication techniques to build arrays of miniature ion traps, similar to techniques used in fabricating high component density microprocessors. A specific focus will be on research using a gallium arsenide/aluminum gallium arsenide heterostructure as a trap architecture, as well as the recent testing of different ion traps fabricated at outside foundries. The construction and characterization of a conventional ceramic trap capable of shuttling an ion through a junction will also be detailed, and reveal the need for moving towards lithographically fabricated traps. Combined, these serve as a set of proof-of-principle experiments pointing to methods for designing and building large scale arrays of ion traps capable of constituting a quantum information processor. As traps become smaller, electrical potentials on the electrodes have greater influence on the ion. This not only pertains to intentionally applied voltages, but also to deleterious noise sources, such as thermal Johnson noise and the more significant ``patch potential" noise, which both cause motional heating of the ion. These problematic noise sources dovetail with my thesis research into trap miniaturization since their effects become more pronounced and impossible to ignore for small trap sizes. Therefore characterizing them and investigating ways to suppress them have become an important component of my research. I will describe an experiment using a pair of movable needle electrodes to measure the ion heating rate corresponding to the harmonic frequency of the trap, the ion-electrode distance, and the electrode temperature. This information is used for characterizing the fluctuating potentials and exploring the possibility of suppressing motional heating by cooling the trap electrodes. This source of noise is also observed in other systems, and its characterization could potentially improve other precision experiments, such as those measuring deviations in the gravitational inverse square law with proximate masses.