No Arabic abstract
Electron beam ion traps (EBIT) are ideal tools for both production and study of highly charged ions (HCI). In order to reduce their construction, maintenance, and operation costs we have developed a novel, compact, room-temperature design, the Heidelberg Compact EBIT (HC-EBIT). Four already commissioned devices operate at the strongest fields (up to 0.86 T) reported for such EBITs using permanent magnets, run electron beam currents up to 80 mA and energies up to 10 keV. They demonstrate HCI production, trapping, and extraction of pulsed Ar$^{16+}$ bunches and continuous 100 pA ion beams of highly charged Xe up to charge state 29+, already with a 4 mA, 2 keV electron beam. Moreover, HC-EBITs offer large solid-angle ports and thus high photon count rates, e. g., in x-ray spectroscopy of dielectronic recombination in HCIs up to Fe$^{24+}$, achieving an electron-energy resolving power of $E/Delta E > 1500$ at 5 keV. Besides traditional on-axis electron guns, we have also implemented a novel off-axis gun for laser, synchrotron, and free-electron laser applications, offering clear optical access along the trap axis. We report on its first operation at a synchrotron radiation facility demonstrating resonant photoexcitation of highly charged oxygen.
Cryogenic environments benefit ion trapping experiments by offering lower motional heating rates, collision energies, and an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) environment for maintaining long ion chains for extended periods of time. Mechanical vibrations caused by compressors in closed-cycle cryostats can introduce relative motion between the ion and the wavefronts of lasers used to manipulate the ions. Here, we present a novel ion trapping system where a commercial low-vibration closed-cycle cryostat is used in a custom monolithic enclosure. We measure mechanical vibrations of the sample stage using an optical interferometer, and observe a root-mean-square relative displacement of 2.4 nm and a peak-to-peak displacement of 17 nm between free-space beams and the trapping location. We packaged a surface ion trap in a cryo-package assembly that enables easy handling, while creating a UHV environment for the ions. The trap cryo-package contains activated carbon getter material for enhanced sorption pumping near the trapping location, and source material for ablation loading. Using $^{171}$Yb$^{+}$ as our ion we estimate the operating pressure of the trap as a function of package temperature using phase transitions of zig-zag ion chains as a probe. We measured the radial mode heating rate of a single ion to be 13 quanta/s on average. The Ramsey coherence measurements yield 330 ms coherence time for counter-propagating Raman carrier transitions using a 355 nm mode-locked pulse laser, demonstrating the high optical stability.
A low-energy, compact and superconducting electron beam ion trap (the Shanghai-Wuhan EBIT or SW-EBIT) for extraction of highly charged ions is presented. The magnetic field in the central drift tube of the SW-EBIT is approximately 0.21 T produced by a pair of high-temperature superconducting coils. The electron-beam energy of the SW-EBIT is in the range of 30-4000 eV, and the maximum electron-beam current is up to 9 mA. Acting as a source of highly charged ions, the ion-beam optics for extraction is integrated, including an ion extractor and an einzel lens. A Wien filter is then used to measure the charge-state distribution of the extracted ions. In this work, the tungsten ions below the charge state of 15 have been produced, extracted, and analyzed. The charge-state distributions and spectra in the range of 530-580 nm of tungsten ions have been measured simultaneously with the electron-beam energy of 279 eV and 300 eV, which preliminarily indicates that the 549.9 nm line comes from $W^{14+}$.
State-of-the-art microfabricated ion traps for quantum information research are approaching nearly one hundred control electrodes. We report here on the development and testing of a new architecture for microfabricated ion traps, built around ball-grid array (BGA) connections, that is suitable for increasingly complex trap designs. In the BGA trap, through-substrate vias bring electrical signals from the back side of the trap die to the surface trap structure on the top side. Gold-ball bump bonds connect the back side of the trap die to an interposer for signal routing from the carrier. Trench capacitors fabricated into the trap die replace area-intensive surface or edge capacitors. Wirebonds in the BGA architecture are moved to the interposer. These last two features allow the trap die to be reduced to only the area required to produce trapping fields. The smaller trap dimensions allow tight focusing of an addressing laser beam for fast single-qubit rotations. Performance of the BGA trap as characterized with $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ions is comparable to previous surface-electrode traps in terms of ion heating rate, mode frequency stability, and storage lifetime. We demonstrate two-qubit entanglement operations with $^{171}$Yb$^+$ ions in a second BGA trap.
To provide spectroscopic data for lowly charged tungsten ions relevant to fusion research, this work focuses on the W8+ ion. Six visible spectra lines in the range of 420-660 nm are observed with a compact electron-beam ion trap in Shanghai. These lines are assigned to W8+ based on their intensity variations as increasing electron-beam energy and the M1 line from the ground configuration in W7+. Furthermore, transition energies are calculated for the 30 lowest levels of the 4f14 5s2 5p4, 4f13 5s2 5p5 and 4f12 5s2 5p6 configurations of W8+ by using the flexible atomic code (FAC) and GRASP package, respectively. Reasonably good agreement is found between our two independent atomic-structure calculations. The resulting atomic parameters are adopted to simulate the spectra based on the collisional-radiative model implemented in the FAC code. This assists us with identification of six strong M1 transitions in 4f13 5s2 5p5 and 4f12 5s2 5p6 configurations from our experiments
We propose an ion trap configuration such that individual traps can be stacked together in a three dimensional simple cubic arrangement. The isolated trap as well as the extended array of ion traps are characterized for different locations in the lattice, illustrating the robustness of the lattice of traps concept. Ease in the addressing of ions at each lattice site, individually or simultaneously, makes this system naturally suitable for a number of experiments. Application of this trap to precision spectroscopy, quantum information processing and the study of few particle interacting system are discussed.