Fabrication of a planar micro Penning trap and numerical investigations of versatile ion positioning protocols

Abstract

We describe a versatile planar Penning trap structure, which allows to dynamically modify the trapping conguration almost arbitrarily. The trap consists of 37 hexagonal electrodes, each with a circumcirle-diameter of 300 m, fabricated in a gold-on-sapphire lithographic technique. Every hexagon can be addressed individually, thus shaping the electric potential. The fabrication of such a device with clean room methods is demonstrated. We illustrate the variability of the device by a detailed numerical simulation of a lateral and a vertical transport and we simulate trapping in racetrack and articial crystal congurations. The trap may be used for ions or electrons, as a versatile container for quantum optics and quantum information experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, pdflatex, to be published in New Journal of Physics (NJP) various changes according to the wishes of the NJP referees. Text added and moved around, title changed, abstract changed, references added rev3: one reference had a typo (ref 15), fixed (phys rev a 72, not 71