Quantum simulator from a block of glass: Rice ion trap also holds heavy ytterbium ions
Rice University researchers have built an ion trap from a single block of fused silica that, unlike earlier traps of this design, also holds heavy ions such as ytterbium. Only the third version worked.
Photo: National Institute of Standards and Technology / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain (cropped and resized)
Video: YouTube · Smalley-Curl Institute | Rice University · youtube.com
Physicists at Rice University in Houston have developed a new type of ion trap for quantum simulators: a monolithic segmented 3D ion trap. According to Rice, earlier traps of this design only worked with light ions such as calcium – the new device also holds heavier ytterbium ions. The work by Guido Pagano, Roman Zhuravel and graduate student Abhishek Menon was carried out with partners at Duke University and the company Translume and was published in Physical Review Applied (DOI 10.1103/srq8-cgnt). The university presented it on 13 October with a video.
The trap is made from a single block of fused silica. Lasers and chemicals were used to cut channels for the ions and trenches for the gold-coated electrodes; the trenches are meant to prevent short circuits and high-voltage breakdown in vacuum. Getting there was hard: the first version began to glow visibly at high radio-frequency voltage, and the second still suffered from unwanted ion motion and heating. "It wasn't until the third generation that we had a viable trap," Menon says.
The third version got a better heat sink and a plasma surface treatment that reduces ion heating. Tests confirmed that it behaves as computer simulations predicted. According to Zhuravel, the monolithic design makes trapped-ion simulators more accessible to academic labs. The release does not give specific performance figures.