Sub-Doppler cooling of trapped ions using optical tweezers

Abstract:We propose a sub-Doppler cooling scheme for trapped-ion crystals in Paul traps. The combination of a hollow tweezer and microwave drive creates an effective two-level system which is cooled through attractive Sisyphus cooling. For ${}^{171}\rm{Yb}^+$ ions, we numerically identify optimal parameters for one- and two-ion crystals, and investigate the cooling rate in ion crystals with up to three ions. Our cooling scheme utilizes a single ion addressed with a tweezer to achieve sub-Doppler cooling of the $N$ axial motional modes perpendicular to the tweezer propagation direction, does not rely on the Lamb-Dicke regime and uses off-resonant light. We reach $1/e$ cooling times for the center of mass mode of $\tau_{\rm com}<2$ ms, and a steady-state excitation number of $\bar{n}_{\rm{com}}\approx 0.7$. Our scheme is well-suited as an intermediate stage between Doppler cooling and ground-state sideband cooling, and can be readily realized in trapped-ion platforms.

Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

arXiv:2609.28138 [physics.atom-ph]

(or arXiv:2609.28138v1 [physics.atom-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.28138 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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