Fast accumulation of ions in a dual trap

TL;DR

This paper presents a rapid, efficient method for transferring and accumulating large ion clouds between traps in high-precision spectroscopy, without relying on cooling, enabling larger ion samples for experiments.

Contribution

The authors introduce a fast, one-way shuttling protocol for ions in a dual trap system that allows accumulation of large ion clouds without cooling.

Findings

Ion clouds of large size achieved with laser cooling.

Shuttling times are shorter than a millisecond.

The method does not depend on cooling processes.

Abstract

Transporting charged particles between different traps has become an important feature in high-precision spectroscopy experiments of different types. In many experiments in atomic and molecular physics, the optical probing of the ions is not carried out at the same location as the creation or state preparation. In our double linear radio-frequency trap, we have implemented a fast protocol allowing to shuttle large ion clouds very efficiently between traps, in times shorter than a millisecond. Moreover, our shuttling protocol is a one-way process, allowing to add ions to an existing cloud without loss of the already trapped sample. This feature makes accumulation possible, resulting in the creation of large ion clouds. Experimental results show, that ion clouds of large size are reached with laser-cooling, however, the described mechanism does not rely on any cooling process.