Developing a Monolithic 3D Fused Silica Blade Trap for Quantum Simulation with Heavy lonic Species

Monolithic 3D fused silica ion traps are a promising platform for trapped-ion quantum technology applications which benefit from the advantages of manually assembled blade traps and microfabricated 2D Paul traps. In a collaboration between Rice University, Duke University and Translume Inc., we present the multi-generational development of our monolithic 3D fused silica ion trap. Improving on our previous generations, in our third generation monolithic trap, we demonstrate high radial confinement (∼ 3MHz at VRF > 450 Vpk) with good axial homogeneity, high multi-directional optical access, low ion heating rates (∼ 1 quanta/s at 3 MHz), and long motional coherence times (∼ 90 ms), enabling high-fidelity quantum operations for high mass trapped ions (e.g. Yb+ ). We discuss our iterative workflow involving the trap’s macroscopic characterization, cycling through trap design, fabrication, and thermal management, before moving to any microscopic characterization using trapped ions for quantum operations.

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Key Points for Thermal applications:

• To ensure sufficient heat dissipation of monolithic fused silica ion traps operated in vacuum, we employ thermal imaging to characterize the heat distribution and validate the trap assembly’s design under high-power RF loads.

• Trap assemblies usually have a wide range in emissivity of materials (gold to ceramics), which makes calibration with a temperature reference crucial, but challenging.

• In-vacuum temperature probes to materials with high, known emissivity, in line of sight with the thermal imager, help to periodically and more accurately calibrate thermal imaging data from the region of interest (ROI).

• Temperature estimation is less accurate when features of the ROI are in the order of the pixel resolution of the thermal imaging setup.​

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