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.

References in corpus (7)

• HITRAP: A facility at GSI for highly charged ions
• Fluorescence during Doppler cooling of a single trapped atom
• Sympathetic Cooling of Mixed Species Two-Ion Crystals for Precision Spectroscopy
• Laser cooling of externally produced Mg ions in a Penning trap for sympathetic cooling of highly charged ions
• Proposed precision laser spectrometer for trapped, highly charged ions
• Resistive and sympathetic cooling of highly-charged-ion clouds in a Penning trap
• Perpendicular laser cooling with a rotating wall potential in a Penning trap

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Sideband cooling of small ion Coulomb crystals in a Penning trap
• The TRAPSENSOR Facility: an Open-Ring 7-Tesla Penning Trap for Laser-Based Precision Experiments
• Production of highly charged ions inside a cryogenic Penning trap by electron-impact ionisation
• Formation of Two-Ion Crystals by Injection from a Paul-Trap Source into a High-Magnetic-Field Penning Trap