2020/01/31 by Elia Perego, Perego, Elia, Lucia Duca +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2001.11968
In the development of atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics, atom-ion\nhybrid systems are characterized by the presence of a new tool in the\nexperimental AMO toolbox: atom-ion interactions. One of the main limitations in\nstate-of-the-art atom-ion experiments is represented by the micromotion\ncomponent of the ions' dynamics in a Paul trap, as the presence of micromotion\nin atom-ion collisions results in a heating mechanism that prevents atom-ion\nmixtures from undergoing a coherent evolution. Here we report the design and\nthe simulation of a novel ion trapping setup especially conceived for the\nintegration with an ultracold atoms experiment. The ion confinement is realized\nby using an electro-optical trap based on the combination of an optical and an\nelectrostatic field, so that no micromotion component will be present in the\nions' dynamics. The confining optical field is generated by a deep optical\nlattice created at the crossing of a bow-tie cavity, while a static electric\nquadrupole ensures the ions' confinement in the plane orthogonal to the optical\nlattice. The setup is also equipped with a Paul trap for cooling the ions\nproduced by photoionization of a hot atomic beam, and the design of the two ion\ntraps facilitates the swapping of the ions from the Paul trap to the\nelectro-optical trap.\n