A mixed system of cooled and trapped, ions and atoms, paves the way for ion assisted cold chemistry and novel many body studies. Due to the different individual trapping mechanisms, trapped atoms are significantly colder than trapped ions, therefore
in the combined system, the strong binary ion$-$atom interaction results in heat flow from ions to atoms. Conversely, trapped ions can also get collisionally heated by the cold atoms, making the resulting equilibrium between ions and atoms intriguing. Here we experimentally demonstrate, Rubidium ions (Rb$^+$) cool in contact with magneto-optically trapped (MOT) Rb atoms, contrary to the general expectation of ion heating for equal ion and atom masses. The cooling mechanism is explained theoretically and substantiated with numerical simulations. The importance of resonant charge exchange (RCx) collisions, which allows swap cooling of ions with atoms, wherein a single glancing collision event brings a fast ion to rest, is discussed.
We report an experimental apparatus and technique which simultaneously traps ions and cold atoms with spatial overlap. Such an apparatus is motivated by the study of ion-atom processes at temperatures ranging from hot to ultra-cold. This area is a la
rgely unexplored domain of physics with cold trapped atoms. In this article we discuss the general design considerations for combining these two traps and present our experimental setup. The ion trap and atom traps are characterized independently of each other. The simultaneous operation of both is then described and experimental signatures of the effect of the ions and cold-atoms on each other are presented. In conclusion the use of such an instrument for several problems in physics and chemistry is briefly discussed.
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 lat
tice, 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.
