Correlations and pair emission in the escape dynamics of ions from one-dimensional traps

TL;DR

This paper investigates how ions escape from one-dimensional traps, revealing that sudden potential reductions cause synchronized pair emissions and that escape timing and energies are correlated, with tunable emission properties.

Contribution

It demonstrates that trap potential reductions induce synchronized ion pair emissions and analyzes the correlations between escape times and energies in a long-range interacting ion system.

Findings

Synchronized emission of ion pairs occurs after potential reduction.

Escape intervals and number of emitted pairs are tunable.

Strong correlations between escape times and kinetic energies are observed.

Abstract

We explore the non-equilibrium escape dynamics of long-range interacting ions in one-dimensional traps. The phase space of the few ion setup and its impact on the escape properties are studied. As a main result we show that an instantaneous reduction of the trap's potential depth leads to the synchronized emission of a sequence of ion pairs if the initial configurations are close to the crystalline ionic configuration. The corresponding time-intervals of the consecutive pair emission as well as the number of emitted pairs can be tuned by changing the final trap depth. Correlations between the escape times and kinetic energies of the ions are observed and analyzed.