Long-term drifts of stray electric fields in a Paul trap

TL;DR

This study examines the long-term evolution of stray electric fields in a Paul trap, revealing different decay mechanisms and achieving very low residual field drifts through careful shielding and control of environmental factors.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the different time scales and mechanisms of stray field drifts in a Paul trap, and demonstrates methods to suppress these drifts for stable ion trapping.

Findings

Photo-induced fields decay within days due to charge discharge.

Atomic beam exposure causes slow drift over months due to surface coating.

Shielding and environmental control reduce field drifts to below 0.03 V/m per day.

Abstract

We investigate the evolution of quasi-static stray electric fields in a linear Paul trap over a period of several months. Depending on how these electric fields are initially induced we observe very different time scales for the field drifts. Photo-induced electric fields decay on time scales of days. We interpret this as photo-electrically generated charges on insulating materials which decay via discharge currents. In contrast, stray fields due to the exposure of the ion trap to a beam of Ba atoms mainly exhibit slow dynamics on the order of months. We explain this observation as a consequence of a coating of the trap electrodes by the atomic beam. This may lead to contact potentials which can slowly drift over time due to atomic diffusion and chemical processes on the surface. In order not to perturb the field evolutions, we suppress the generation of additional charges and atomic coatings in the Paul trap during the measurements. For this, we shield the ion trap from ambient light and only allow the use of near-infrared lasers. Furthermore, we minimize the flux of atoms into the ion trap chamber. Long-term operation of our shielded trap led us to a regime of very low residual electric field drifts of less than 0.03 V/m per day.