Marko Cetina, Andrew T. Grier, Vladan Vuletić
We present a fundamental limit to the sympathetic cooling of ions in radio-frequency traps using cold atoms. The limit arises from the work done by the trap electric field during a long-range ion-atom collision and applies even to cooling by a zero-temperature atomic gas in a perfectly dc-compensated trap. We conclude that in current experimental implementations this collisional heating prevents access to the quantum regimes of atom-ion interaction or ion motion. We determine conditions on the atom-ion mass ratio and on the trap parameters for reaching the s -wave collision regime and the trap ground state.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2806
No comments:
Post a Comment