Demonstration of new Paul–Straubel trap for trapping single ions

New Paul–Straubel traps H. Straubel, Naturwissenschaften 18, 506 (1955) have been recently constructed and used to trap single Ba+ ions. Unlike a conventional rf trap, these traps use only a ring electrode surrounded by an uncritical ground electrode structure. The overall simplicity makes it easy to miniaturize the trap and to control the trapping potential spatial orientation. The new design also allows intense heating of the ring electrode with an ion in the trap simply by passing a large current through it. This removes surface layers responsible for large contact potentials varying over the ring surface and greatly reduces the forced micromotion of the ion, which is supposedly ‘‘at rest.’’