Extending the applicability of an open-ring trap to perform experiments with a single laser-cooled ion

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that an open-ring ion trap originally designed for radioactive ion experiments can be effectively used for laser cooling of single ions, enabling advanced mass spectrometry techniques without modifying the trap's design.

Contribution

The study shows the open-ring trap's versatility for laser cooling of single ions, expanding its application scope without structural modifications.

Findings

Successful Doppler cooling of $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ions from large clouds to single ions.

The trap's design allows for single-ion sensitivity in laser cooling experiments.

Potential applications in radioactive ion beam facilities and single-ion mass spectrometry.

Abstract

An open-ring ion trap, also referred to as transparent trap was initially built up to perform $\beta$-$\nu$ correlation experiments with radioactive ions. This trap geometry is also well suited to perform experiments with laser-cooled ions, serving for the development of a new type of Penning trap, in the framework of the project TRAPSENSOR at the University of Granada. The goal of this project is to use a single $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ion as detector for single-ion mass spectrometry. Within this project and without any modification to the initial electrode configuration, it was possible to perform Doppler cooling on $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ions, starting from large clouds and reaching single ion sensitivity. This new feature of the trap might be important also for other experiments with ions produced at Radioactive Ion Beam (RIB) facilities. In this publication, the trap and the laser system will be described, together with their performance with respect to laser cooling applied to large ion clouds down to a single ion.