ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Quantum Sci. Technol.

Sec. Basic Science for Quantum Technologies

Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frqst.2025.1596801

This article is part of the Research TopicMicromotion in Trapped Ion SystemsView all 3 articles

Micromotion compensation using dark and bright ion species

Provisionally accepted
  • Department of Physics of complex systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Jerusalem, Israel

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Stray electric fields induce excess micromotion in ion traps, limiting experimental performance. We present a new micromotion-compensation technique that utilizes a dark ion in a multi-species bright-dark-bright linear ion crystal. Stray electric fields in the radial plane of the trap deform the crystal axially due to the different masses of dark and bright ions. We exploit the mode softening near the transition to the zig-zag configuration to enhance the crystal deformation and, as a result, increase the method's sensitivity dramatically. We corroborate our results with a modified ion-displacement compensation method using a single bright ion. Our modification allows us to compensate stray fields on the 2D radial plane from a 1D measurement of the ion position on the camera by controlling the asymmetry of the two radial modes of the trap. Both methods require only a fixed imaging camera and continuous ion-fluorescence detection. As such, they can be readily implemented in most ion-trapping experiments without additional hardware modifications.

Keywords: ion trapping, Micromotion compensation, Multi-specie ions, Dark ion specie, Bright ion specie, micromotion

Received: 20 Mar 2025; Accepted: 05 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Barnea, Einav, Drotleff, Hochner and Meir. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
Orr Barnea, Department of Physics of complex systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Jerusalem, Israel
Ziv Meir, Department of Physics of complex systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Jerusalem, Israel

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.