Coulomb crystallization of highly charged ions

Schmöger, Lisa; Versolato, Oscar; Schwarz, Maria A.; Kohnen, M.; Windberger, Alexander; Piest, Baptist; Feuchtenbeiner, S.; Pedregosa, J.; Leopold, Tobias; Micke, P.; Hansen, Anders Kragh; Baumann, T.; Drewsen, Michael; Ullrich, J.; Schmidt, Piet O.; López‐Urrutia, J. R. Crespo

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/635/2/022059

Cited by 14 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Since HCI generally do not offer suitable transitions for direct laser cooling, sympathetic cooling of multiple HCI by laser-cooled 9 Be + ions was implemented in a Penning trap at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 21 , reaching an ion temperature of around 4 K. More recently, the Cryogenic Paul Trap Experiment (CryPTEx) 22 demonstrated reliable Coulomb crystallization of single 40 Ar 13+ ions in a crystal of many 9 Be + ions. Sympathetic Doppler cooling down to the 10 mK level and two-ion crystal preparation 23,24 paved the way for high-accuracy spectroscopy. Even so, spectroscopy of narrow transitions in single ions requires efficient state detection on a different, fast cycling transition 1 , typically also used for laser cooling.…”

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confidence: 99%

Coherent laser spectroscopy of highly charged ions using quantum logic

Micke

Leopold

King

et al. 2020

Nature

126

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Precision spectroscopy of atomic systems 1 is an invaluable tool for the advancement of our understanding of fundamental interactions and symmetries 2. Recently, highly charged ions (HCI) have been proposed for sensitive tests of physics beyond the Standard Model 2-5 and as candidates for high-accuracy atomic clocks 3,5. However, the implementation of these ideas has been hindered by the parts-per-million level spectroscopic accuracies achieved to date 6-8. Here, we cool a trapped HCI to the lowest reported temperatures, and introduce coherent laser spectroscopy on HCI with an eight orders of magnitude leap in precision. We probe the forbidden optical transition in 40 Ar 13+ at 441 nm using quantum-logic spectroscopy 9,10 and measure both its excited-state lifetime and g-factor. Our work ultimately unlocks the potential of HCI, a large, ubiquitous atomic class, for quantum information processing, novel frequency standards, and highly sensitive tests of fundamental physics, such as searching for dark matter candidates 11 or violations of fundamental symmetries 2. Alike a microscope aimed at the quantum world, laser spectroscopy pursues ever higher resolving power. Every increase in resolution enables deeper insights into the subtle effects that all known fundamental interactions have on the atomic wave function. Advances in optical frequency metrology have dramatically improved resolution in the last three decades 1 , and are making laser spectroscopy an extremely sensitive tool for studying open physics questions such as the nature of dark matter, the strength of parity violation, or a possible violation of Einstein's theory of relativity 2. However, only a few atomic and ionic species are currently within the reach of cutting-edge optical frequency metrology. Expanding this field of exploration to systems with high sensitivity to such effects is therefore crucial. Due to their extreme properties, highly charged ions (HCI) are promising candidates for such fundamental tests. Contributions from special

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confidence: 99%

Coherent laser spectroscopy of highly charged ions using quantum logic

Micke

Leopold

King

et al. 2020

Nature

126

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“…However, the XRL proposed here can be used to excite an individual state, due to the good temporal coherence and saturated intensity, and could thus complement the capabilities at broadband, incoherent XFEL sources. This includes, e.g., x-ray stimulated Raman adiabatic passage for the coherent preparation of HCIs towards generating an x-ray frequency comb 9 , and resonant excitation of highly charged ions in an electron-beam ion trap for precision tests of quantum electrodynamics 84,85 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrow-band hard-x-ray lasing with highly charged ions

Lyu

Cavaletto

Keitel

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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A scheme is put forward to generate fully coherent x-ray lasers based on population inversion in highly charged ions, created by fast inner-shell photoionization using broadband x-ray free-electronlaser (XfeL) pulses in a laser-produced plasma. numerical simulations based on the Maxwell-Bloch theory show that one can obtain high-intensity, femtosecond x-ray pulses of relative bandwidths Δω/ω = 10 −5-10 −7 , by orders of magnitude narrower than in x-ray free-electron-laser pulses for discrete wavelengths down to the sub-ångström regime. Such x-ray lasers can be applicable in the study of x-ray quantum optics and metrology, investigating nonlinear interactions between x-rays and matter, or in high-precision spectroscopy studies in laboratory astrophysics.

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“…Even though this method provides an accurate identification at the single ion level, it is destructive, and may only be used as a cross-check for verifying the previous non-destructive observation and identification of single thorium ions. The experimental challenges are of similar sort as compared to trapping highly charged ions for spectroscopy that are generated in an EBIT [7,8].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Catching, trapping and in-situ-identification of thorium ions inside Coulomb crystals of 40Ca+ ions

et al. 2019

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Thorium ions exhibit unique nuclear properties with high relevance for testing symmetries of nature, and Paul traps feature an ideal experimental platform for performing high precision quantum logic spectroscopy. Loading of stable or long-lived isotopes is well-established and relies on ionization from an atomic beam. A different approach allows trapping short-lived isotopes available as alphadecay daughters, which recoil from a thin sample of the precursor nuclide. A prominent example is the short-lived 229m Th, populated in a decay of long-lived 233 U. Here, ions are provided by an external source and are decelerated to be available for trapping. Such setups offer the option to trap various isotopes and charge states of thorium. Investigating this complex procedure, we demonstrate the observation of single 232 Th + ions trapped, embedded into and sympathetically cooled via Coulomb interactions by co-trapped 40 Ca + ions. Furthermore, we discuss different options for a non-destructive identification of the sympathetically cooled thorium ions in the trap, and describe in detail our chosen experimental method, identifying mass and charge of thorium ions from the positions of calcium ions, as their fluorescence is imaged on a CCD camera. These findings are verified by means of a time-of-flight signal when extracting ions of different mass-to-charge ratio from the Paul trap and steering them into a detector.

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Coulomb crystallization of highly charged ions

Cited by 14 publications

References 3 publications

Coherent laser spectroscopy of highly charged ions using quantum logic

Coherent laser spectroscopy of highly charged ions using quantum logic

Narrow-band hard-x-ray lasing with highly charged ions

Catching, trapping and in-situ-identification of thorium ions inside Coulomb crystals of 40Ca+ ions

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