We have developed a vacuum chamber and control system for rapid testing of microfabricated surface ion traps. Our system is modular in design and is based on an in-vacuum printed circuit board with integrated filters. We have used this system to successfully trap and cool barium ions and have achieved ion 'dark' lifetimes of 31.6 s +- 3.4 s with controlled shuttling of ions. We provide a detailed description of the ion trap system including the in-vacuum materials used, control electronics and neutral atom source. We discuss the challenges presented in achieving a system which can work reliably over two years of operations in which the trap under test was changed at least 10 times.
@article{arxiv.1305.2224,
title = {A System for Trapping Barium Ions in a Microfabricated Surface Trap},
author = {Richard D Graham and Shaw-Pin Chen and Tomasz Sakrejda and John Wright and Zichao Zhou and Boris B Blinov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.2224},
year = {2014}
}