At Imperial College we have mainly carrying out our research using Penning traps, which are explained in this section.
Find out more
Page in progress
Sideband cooling is a well-established technique for preparing trapped ions in the ground state of their motion in the trap.
After Doppler cooling, ions often form Coulomb crystals in the trap. This unusual state of matter allows an assembly of ions to be treated as a single quantum mechanical system.
Since an ion cooled to its ground state in a trap is such a well-controlled and isolated quantum mechanical system, it can show excellent coherence properties.
Any experiment is perfect in theory, but in practice there are many aspects that are different than we would like them to be.
