Related papers: Non-destructive detection of large molecules witho…
We produce cold and dense clouds of atomic ions (Ca$^+$, Dy$^+$) by laser ablation of metal targets and cryogenic buffer gas cooling of the resulting plasma. We measure the temperature and density of the ion clouds using laser absorption…
While the linear radiofrequency trap finds various applications in high-precision spectroscopy and quantum information, its higher-order cousin, the linear multipole trap, is almost exclusively employed in physical chemistry. Recently,…
Efficient transport of cold atoms or ions is a subject of increasing concern in many experimental applications reaching from quantum information processing to frequency metrology. For the scalable quantum computer architectures based on the…
Isolating neutral and charged particles from the environment is essential in precision experiments. For decades, this has been achieved by trapping ions with radio-frequency (rf) fields and neutral particles with optical fields. Recently,…
We demonstrate broadband laser cooling of atomic ions in an rf trap using ultrafast pulses from a modelocked laser. The temperature of a single ion is measured by observing the size of a time-averaged image of the ion in the known harmonic…
Molecular ions can be held in a chain of laser-cooled atomic ions by sympathetic cooling. This system is ideal for performing high-precision molecular spectroscopy with applications in astrochemistry and fundamental physics. Here we show…
We report the sympathetic cooling and Coulomb crystallization of molecular ions above the surface of an ion-trap chip. N$_2^+$ and CaH$^+$ ions were confined in a surface-electrode radiofrequency ion trap and cooled by the interaction with…
The non-linear dynamics of large ion clouds ($N \geq 256 $ ions) trapped in radio-frequency traps and coupled to laser-cooling give rise to a bistable behaviour of the temperature. Numerical simulations of the free evolution of a large…
We propose the use of trapped ions for detection of millicharged dark matter. Millicharged particles will scatter off the ions, giving a signal either in individual events or in the overall heating rate of the ions. Ion traps have several…
A cryogenic radio-frequency ion trap system designed for quantum logic spectroscopy of highly charged ions is presented. It includes a segmented linear Paul trap, an in-vacuum imaging lens and a helical resonator. We demonstrate ground…
We demonstrate millikelvin thermometry of laser cooled trapped ions with high-resolution imaging. This equilibrium approach is independent of the cooling dynamics and has lower systematic error than Doppler thermometry, with \pm5 mK…
We propose a joint experimental and theoretical approach to measure the self-diffusion in a laser-cooled trapped ion cloud where part of the ions are shelved in a long-lived dark state. The role of the self-diffusion coefficient in the…
We present theoretical and experimental progress towards a new approach for the precision spectroscopy, coherent manipulation and state-to-state chemistry of single isolated molecular ions in the gas phase. Our method consists of a…
A novel method of ground state laser cooling of trapped atoms utilizes the absorption profile of a three (or multi-) level system which is tailored by a quantum interference. With cooling rates comparable to conventional sideband cooling,…
Laser cooling typically requires one or more repump lasers to clear dark states and enable recycling transitions. Here, we have achieved cooling of Be+ ions using a single laser beam, facilitated by one-dimensional heating through…
In this work, we demonstrate measurements of photodestruction rates of translationally cold, charged biomolecules. The long-term stable storage of the molecular ions in an ion trap at ultra-high vacuum conditions allows measurement of small…
The simulation of vibrational energy transport and quantum thermodynamics with trapped ions requires good methods for the estimation of temperatures. One valuable tool for this purpose is based on the fit of dark resonances in the…
We introduce the estimation protocol for detecting the temperature of the transverse vibrational modes of linear ion crystal. We show that thanks to the laser induced laser coupling between the vibrational modes and the collective spin…
In trapped ion system, accurate thermometry of ion is crucial for evaluating the system state and precisely performing quantum operations. However, when the motional state of a single ion is far away from the ground state, the spatial…
We propose and analyze a scheme for sympathetic cooling of the translational motion of polar molecules in an optical lattice, interacting one by one with laser-cooled ions in a radio-frequency trap. The energy gap between the excitation…