Arne Härter, Artjom Krükow, Andreas Brunner, Johannes Hecker Denschlag
We investigate the evolution of stray electric fields in a linear Paul trap over a period of several months. We demonstrate a way to clearly distinguish between the two main sources of these fields, namely insulated charged up patches and patch charges originating from contact potentials. To achieve high sensitivity in these measurements, we operate the trap in a way that strongly suppresses the generation of additional patch charges. For this, we shield the ion trap from ambient light and only allow the use of near-infrared lasers. Furthermore, we minimize additional contaminations of the trap electrodes by minimizing the flux of atoms into the ion trap chamber. We find that photo-induced electric fields decay on time scales of days. In contrast, stray fields due to contamination-induced contact potentials on trap electrodes mainly exhibit slow dynamics on the order of months, probably dominated by diffusion and slow chemical processes. Long-term operation of our shielded trap led us to a regime of very low residual electric field drifts of better than 0.03$\,$V/m per day.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.6826
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