We designed and operated a surface ion trap, with an ion-substrate distance of 500\mum, realized with standard printed-circuit-board techniques. The trap has been loaded with up to a few thousand Sr+ ions in the Coulomb-crystal regime. An analytical model of the pseudo-potential allowed us to determine the parameters that drive the trap into anisotropic regimes in which we obtain large (N>150) purely 2D ion Coulomb crystals. These crystals may open a simple and reliable way to experiments on quantum simulations of large 2D systems.
@article{arxiv.1201.2584,
title = {Large 2D Coulomb crystals in a radio frequency surface ion trap},
author = {B. Szymanski and R. Dubessy and B. Dubost and S. Guibal and J. -P. Likforman and L. Guidoni},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1201.2584},
year = {2015}
}