The research described in this blog involves trapping one or a few single atoms inside an ultra-high vacuum system (a stainless steel chamber inside which the pressure is less than that on the surface of the moon). To trap the atoms, we first make them positively charged by removing one of their outer-shell electrons. Once charged, the atoms – now, ions – can be confined by electric fields. We use devices called Paul traps to generate electric fields and suspend single ions inside our vacuum system.
If you’d like to hear more about how ion trapping works and what we can do with trapped ions, here’s a talk I gave at the Boston Museum of Science on how we can use trapped ions to do quantum computation.
Published by Diana Prado Lopes Aude Craik
I'm a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Fellow in physics working with trapped atomic ions. I'm in the first year of a three-year MSCA global fellowship, hosted by ETH Zurich and MIT. For the first two years of the fellowship, I'll be at MIT working with Vladan Vuletic's research group and, for the final year, I'll be at ETH working with Jonathan Home. I completed my undergraduate studies at MIT and my DPhil at the University of Oxford. Most of my research so far has been in quantum computation and, more recently, precision measurement with trapped ions, but I have also had the opportunity to work with nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond (impurities in diamond that behave like artificial atoms, trapped in the diamond's crystal lattice) at Harvard, with Ron Walsworth and Evelyn Hu.
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