A System for Trapping Barium Ions in a Microfabricated Surface Trap

TL;DR

This paper presents a modular system for trapping and controlling barium ions in microfabricated surface traps, demonstrating successful ion trapping, cooling, and shuttling with long ion lifetimes in a reliable setup.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel modular vacuum and control system with integrated in-vacuum electronics for microfabricated ion traps, enabling reliable long-term operation and testing.

Findings

Achieved ion dark lifetime of 31.6 seconds

Successfully trapped and cooled barium ions

Demonstrated controlled ion shuttling

Abstract

We have developed a vacuum chamber and control system for rapid testing of microfabricated surface ion traps. Our system is modular in design and is based on an in-vacuum printed circuit board with integrated filters. We have used this system to successfully trap and cool barium ions and have achieved ion 'dark' lifetimes of 31.6 s +- 3.4 s with controlled shuttling of ions. We provide a detailed description of the ion trap system including the in-vacuum materials used, control electronics and neutral atom source. We discuss the challenges presented in achieving a system which can work reliably over two years of operations in which the trap under test was changed at least 10 times.