Heating rate and electrode charging measurements in a scalable, microfabricated, surface-electrode ion trap

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a scalable microfabricated surface-electrode ion trap, measuring its heating rate, electrode charging, and micromotion, demonstrating its potential for quantum information processing.

Contribution

It introduces a microfabricated ion trap using scalable semiconductor and MEMS processes, with detailed performance measurements showing comparable results to existing traps.

Findings

Micromotion amplitude reduced to <~ 10 nm with on-package capacitors

Ion trapping lifetime and charging effects characterized

Heating rate comparable to similar-sized traps

Abstract

We characterise the performance of a surface-electrode ion "chip" trap fabricated using established semiconductor integrated circuit and micro-electro-mechanical-system (MEMS) microfabrication processes which are in principle scalable to much larger ion trap arrays, as proposed for implementing ion trap quantum information processing. We measure rf ion micromotion parallel and perpendicular to the plane of the trap electrodes, and find that on-package capacitors reduce this to <~ 10 nm in amplitude. We also measure ion trapping lifetime, charging effects due to laser light incident on the trap electrodes, and the heating rate for a single trapped ion. The performance of this trap is found to be comparable with others of the same size scale.