Microfabricated ion traps

Abstract

Ion traps offer the opportunity to study fundamental quantum systems with high level of accuracy highly decoupled from the environment. Individual atomic ions can be controlled and manipulated with electric fields, cooled to the ground state of motion with laser cooling and coherently manipulated using optical and microwave radiation. Microfabricated ion traps hold the advantage of allowing for smaller trap dimensions and better scalability towards large ion trap arrays also making them a vital ingredient for next generation quantum technologies. Here we provide an introduction into the principles and operation of microfabricated ion traps. We show an overview of material and electrical considerations which are vital for the design of such trap structures. We provide guidance in how to choose the appropriate fabrication design, consider different methods for the fabrication of microfabricated ion traps and discuss previously realized structures. We also discuss the phenomenon of anomalous heating of ions within ion traps, which becomes an important factor in the miniaturization of ion traps.

Ion-trajectory analysis for micromotion minimization and the measurement of small forces

“…0.92 (16) lightweight particles and low trap frequencies along the direction of the scattering force [see Eq. (20)].…”

“…They are one of the most promising candidates for quantum computation [2] and for quantum simulations where the quantum mechanical properties of a system difficult to investigate directly is simulated using the well-understood and -controlled quantum system of trapped ions [9][10][11][12][13][14]. The size of this quantum system can be scaled up by entangling fewion systems in complex segmented trapping architectures [15][16][17].…”

Spatiotemporal Oscillation Patterns in the Collective Relaxation Dynamics of Interacting Particles in Periodic Potentials

“…interacting colloidal particles in optical lattices [28,29] or with cold ions either in an array of microtraps [16,17,27] or in a segmented rftrap with many dc-electrodes [30]. Using 40 Ca + ions and employing a distance of L ∼ 100µm between individual trapping regions as well as an oscillation frequency of 1/T ∼ 10 5 /s (i.e.…”

“…In view of the formidable progress achieved in recent years with respect to the cooling and trapping of particles [12,13] and the control of their interactions [14], it is highly desirable to study the emergence of structure and complexity out of equilibrium with the extremely well controlled and prepared ensembles provided by cold atoms in optical lattices [13,15] and ions in microtraps [16,17]. Specifically for ions it is known that they possess already for their equilibrium a plethora of different configurations, such as zig-zag chains [18,19] and ion crystals possessing concentric rings (2D), shells (3D) [20] and 'string-of-disks' configurations [21].…”

Comparison of ancilla preparation and measurement procedures for the Steane [[7,1,3]] code on a model ion-trap quantum computer

“…A scalable architecture has been proposed based on shuttling ions between traps [11] and work is ongoing to implement this architecture experimentally [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. This framework has been the basis for a number of studies on the resource requirements for implementing large quantum algorithms [21][22][23] and has also been considered as the elementary logical unit of hybrid schemes using photonic interconnects [24].…”