Superstatistical velocity distributions of cold trapped ions in molecular dynamics simulations

Abstract

We present a realistic molecular-dynamics treatment of laser-cooled ions in radiofrequency ion traps which avoids previously made simplifications such as modeling laser cooling as a friction force and combining individual heating mechanisms into a single effective heating force. Based on this implementation, we show that infrequent energetic collisions of single ions with background gas molecules lead to pronounced heating of the entire ion ensemble and a time-varying secular ensemble temperature which manifests itself in a superstatistical time-averaged velocity distribution of the ions. The effect of this finding on the experimental determination of ion temperatures and rate constants for cold chemical reactions is discussed.

13 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. A

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Dynamics of a ground-state cooled ion colliding with ultra-cold atoms
• Superstatistical energy distributions of an ion in an ultracold buffer gas
• Experimental apparatus for overlapping a ground-state cooled ion with ultracold atoms
• High-precision spectroscopy of the HD+ molecule at the 1-p.p.b. level
• Energy distributions of an ion in a radiofrequency trap immersed in a buffer gas under the influence of additional external forces
• Ion counting and temperature determination of Coulomb-crystallized laser-cooled ions in traps using convolutional neural networks