Towards Sympathetic Cooling of Highly Charged Ions by Laser-Cooled Ca+ Ions

Abstract

The long-term goal of the Penning trap system for the heavy ion accelerator named RAON in Korea is to obtain an order of magnitude higher mass accuracy for short-lived rare isotopes. For that purpose, we are developing a sympathetic cooler for highly charged ions by exploiting laser-cooled Ca+ ions. We installed a prototype octagon chamber with a calcium atom source, a Paul trap, and a helical resonator for the high-voltage RF supply. The laser system is composed of three extended cavity diode lasers (423, 397, 866 nm) plus one UV diode laser (375 nm). The optical frequency stabilization setup is made up of a wavelength meter, a multichannel fiber switch and a PXI system with an 8-channel analog output module. After having obtained a resonant ionization signal from the calcium atomic beam, we applied the RF voltage to the trap electrodes and illuminated the cooling lasers at the center of the trap. We successfully observed a laser-cooled ion bunch and a linearly aligned ion string by using imaging optics and an electron multiplying charge coupled device (EMCCD) camera. In addition to the experimental effort, we performed a simulation study for cooling Sn-132(10+) ions inside a laser-cooled Ca-40(+) Coulomb crystal by using a parallel computation technique.