Seminar on
Modern Optics and Spectroscopy


Isaac Chuang, MIT

"Planar ion traps for quantum information science and spectroscopy"

April 1, 2008

12:00 noon - 1:00 p.m. Grier Room 34-401


Abstract:

Recent experiments demonstrate that ions can be trapped with electrodes on the surface of microfabricated chips.  This new generation of ion traps offers the potential for sophisticated and selective control of trapped ions, for applications in quantum information and spectroscopy.  However, rapid decoherence of motional states occurs in such traps, when ions are confined d=100 micrometers or less from the surface, in typical operation.  This noise is given as a heating rate of about 1000 quanta per second, which grows as d^{-4}, and is attributed to local fluctuations of surface patch potentials.  We present new data on how cryogenic operation of d=75 micrometer gold-on-quartz ion traps at 6 Kelvin leads to dramatic suppression of such ion heating noise, to 1 quanta per second, and discuss how these long coherence time traps may open new avenues to spectroscopy of molecular ions.

TUESDAYS, 12:00-1:00, GRIER ROOM (34-401)
Refreshments served following the seminar

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Co-sponsored by the George R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory,
the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and
the School of Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.