Rapid crystallization of externally produced ions in a Penning trap
Abstract
We have studied the cooling dynamics, formation process and geometric structure of mesoscopic crystals of externally produced magnesium ions in a Penning trap. We present a cooling model and measurements for a combination of buffer gas cooling and laser cooling which has been found to reduce the ion kinetic energy by eight orders of magnitude from several hundreds of eV to micro-eV and below within seconds. With ion numbers of the order of 1000 to 100000, such cooling leads to the formation of ion Coulomb crystals which display a characteristic shell structure in agreement with theory of non-neutral plasmas. We show the production and characterization of two-species ion crystals as a means of sympathetic cooling of ions lacking a suitable laser-cooling transition.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1609.06973,
title = {Rapid crystallization of externally produced ions in a Penning trap},
author = {T. Murboeck and S. Schmidt and G. Birkl and W. Noertershaeuser and R. C. Thompson and M. Vogel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.06973},
year = {2016}
}