Trapping and cooling of ¹⁷⁴Yb⁺ ions in a microfabricated surface trap

Trapped atomic ions are the leading candidate to act as individual quantum bits in a large quantum information processing system. Ion traps can be conformed to a two-dimensional surface, which provides a way to increase the number of ions while maintaining the ability to move individual ions in a two-dimensional grid. However, surface traps tend to suffer from shallow trap depths and higher motional heating rates. In this work, we report the design, fabrication, and testing of a simple gold-on-fused-silica ion trap optimized for a deep trapping potential and stable motional modes. The desirable trap characteristics include long lifetime, fully-compensated micromotion, and high secular trap frequencies that were measured using a trapped and cooled ¹⁷⁴Yb⁺ ion. This trap design can be integrated with an optical cavity to enhance the ion-photon coupling.