2012/02/12 by Michael Drewsen, Thierry Matthey, Drewsen, Michael +7
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph) #Atomic and Molecular Clusters (physics.atm-clus) #Atomic and Molecular Physics #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications #Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph) #physics.atm-clus #physics.atom-ph #physics.plasm-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1202.2544
arxiv created 2012/02/12 · openalex publication_date 2012/02/12 · arxiv updated 2012/02/14 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Coulomb crystallisation of large ensembles of ions has in the past years been intensively studied experimentally with many spectacular results of relevance to infinite systems in one-, two-, and three-dimensions.While strings of a few ions have proven to be very attractive objects in quantum information processing, larger Coulomb crystals have very recently found applications within other aspects the dynamics of quantum systems. Smaller finite ensembles of cold identical charged particles confined by a harmonic potential furthermore constitute very special types of clusters due to the pure repulsive long-range inter-particle forces. Here, we report on the direct imaging of metastable structures of Coulomb clusters consisting of a few thousands confined and laser-cooled 40Ca+ ions. The observations are attributed to structural excitations due to finite temperatures, a feature likely to appear in clusters of short-range interacting particles, but yet not observed directly.