Fast and efficient transport of large ion clouds

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a fast and efficient method for transporting large ion clouds over significant distances with high transfer efficiency, crucial for quantum and precision measurement applications.

Contribution

It introduces an optimized transport technique that achieves over 90% efficiency for large ion clouds within 100 microseconds, even with potential mismatches.

Findings

Transport over 20 mm achieved in 100 μs

Efficiency exceeds 90% for clouds up to 50,000 ions

100% transfer efficiency for clouds under 2000 ions

Abstract

The manipulation of trapped charged particles by electric fields is an accurate, robust and reliable technique for many applications or experiments in high-precision spectroscopy. The transfer of the ion sample between multiple traps allows the use of a tailored environment in quantum information, cold chemistry, or frequency metrology experiments. In this article, we experimentally study the transport of ion clouds of up to 50 000 ions. The design of the trap makes ions very sensitive to any mismatch between the assumed electric potential and the actual local one. Nevertheless, we show that being fast (100 $\mu$s to transfer over more than 20 mm) increases the transport efficiency to values higher than 90 %, even with a large number of ions. For clouds of less than 2000 ions, a 100 % transfer efficiency is observed.