Doppler cooling of calcium ions using a dipole-forbidden transition

Abstract

Doppler cooling of calcium ions has been experimentally demonstrated using the S1/2 to D5/2 dipole-forbidden transition. Scattering forces and fluorescence levels a factor of 5 smaller than for usual Doppler cooling on the dipole allowed S1/2 to P1/2 transition have been achieved. Since the light scattered from the ions can be monitored at (violet) wavelengths that are very different from the excitation wavelengths, single ions can be detected with an essentially zero background level. This, as well as other features of the cooling scheme, can be extremely valuable for ion trap based quantum information processing.

4 pages, 4 figures, minor changes to commentary and references

References in corpus (3)

• Scalable multi-particle entanglement of trapped ions
• 'Designer atoms' for quantum metrology
• Efficient coherent internal state transfer in trapped ions using Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Multi-zone trapped-ion qubit control in an integrated photonics QCCD device
• Long-range-enhanced surface codes
• Motional heating of spatially extended ion crystals
• Systematic study of tunable laser cooling for trapped-ion experiments
• Two-step Doppler cooling of a three-level ladder system with an intermediate metastable level