Loading of a surface-electrode ion trap from a remote, precooled source

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method for loading ions into a surface-electrode trap using a remote, precooled neutral atom source, achieving high loading rates and reduced surface contamination, which benefits scalable quantum computing.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate a remote, laser-cooled atom loading technique for surface-electrode ion traps, improving loading efficiency and isotopic selectivity while minimizing surface contamination.

Findings

Achieved ion loading rates up to 125 ions/sec.

Reduced metal deposition on the trap surface compared to hot vapor loading.

Potential for enhanced isotopic selectivity in ion loading.

Abstract

We demonstrate loading of ions into a surface-electrode trap (SET) from a remote, laser-cooled source of neutral atoms. We first cool and load $\sim$ $10^6$ neutral $^{88}$Sr atoms into a magneto-optical trap from an oven that has no line of sight with the SET. The cold atoms are then pushed with a resonant laser into the trap region where they are subsequently photoionized and trapped in an SET operated at a cryogenic temperature of 4.6 K. We present studies of the loading process and show that our technique achieves ion loading into a shallow (15 meV depth) trap at rates as high as 125 ions/s while drastically reducing the amount of metal deposition on the trap surface as compared with direct loading from a hot vapor. Furthermore, we note that due to multiple stages of isotopic filtering in our loading process, this technique has the potential for enhanced isotopic selectivity over other loading methods. Rapid loading from a clean, isotopically pure, and precooled source may enable scalable quantum information processing with trapped ions in large, low-depth surface trap arrays that are not amenable to loading from a hot atomic beam.