Advances in cooling and trapping for several distinct species of atoms, ions and molecules have gone hand-in-hand for a long time now. Cold dilute gas ensembles to single particle realization of these have led to investigations of diverse problems in many body physics and exotic physics on one hand to unprecedented spectroscopic precision on the other. In most cases, it is the interaction between trapped particles and the confining fields which is used to realize the system of interest. In these systems, it is typical to know the initial position and motional state with precision. Most experiments though are performed with either atoms or ions or molecules.
Combining cold ions, atoms and molecules for experiments has been gaining traction in recent times. Such combined hybrid traps [1] pose very specific challenges for simultaneous trapping and cooling of the multiple species. In addition the interactions between different species become paramount and it is imperative to understand how the combined systems evolve, how energy is exchanged, what is the final state of this combined system, etc. In this talk I shall present our experimental system which can simultaneously cool and trap, within a cavity mode, atoms, ion and molecules in any combination [2]. In this experiment interactions between co-trapped species whose long range interaction range from 1/r to 1/r6 can be probed. I shall then present results of how an ion in a Paul trap is cooled by a MOT of atoms. The details of the cooling hold several surprises such that the ultimate temperature of the trapped ions can be decided by the spatial size of the MOT [3,4], the process of resonant charge exchange is very effective of ion cooling [5], etc. I shall conclude by summarizing the ion cooling results and with a brief description of cavity based work from our group.
[1] K. Ravi, S. Lee, A. Sharma, G. Werth, and S. A. Rangwala, Appl. Phys. B 107, 971 (2012).
[2] S. Jyothi, T. Ray, N. B. Ram, and S. A. Rangwala, in Ion Traps Tomorrow’s Applications (IOS Press, 2015), 189, 269–278.
[3] K. Ravi, S. Lee, A. Sharma, G. Werth, and S. A. Rangwala, Nat. Commun. 3, 1126 (2012).
[4] S. Dutta, R. Sawant, and S. A. Rangwala, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 113401 (2017).
[5] S. Dutta and S. A. Rangwala, arXiv:1705.07572