SBIR-STTR Award

We are proposing to design and fabricate an advanced monolithic 3D blade trap, which will be much more powerful and more stable than typical blade traps. Our design will incorporate features that will radically improve the trap operational capabilities over today’s standards. The trapping zone will be cut up into spatially distinctive sections, each of which will be optimized for performing a specific task. This will provide a capability that, so far, has been offered only by a few surface traps. Furthermore, unlike surface traps, our 3D design will offer advantages such as low heating rates, very efficient screening from stray electric fields, deep trapping potentials, and broad optical access. Our design will also include a means to efficiently dissipate heat, as required for stable trapping fields and reliable entangling operations. It will include a mechanism to control the trap frequency, which otherwise drifts as a result of unwanted fluctuations of the rf voltage, and it will incorporate some optical functionalities including laser beam application, and/or photon collection for state detection or remote entanglement. This trap, being monolithic, will require no assembly and it will fulfill the required micron-tolerances in positions of the different charge-carrying elements in all three dimensions across the entirety of the structure. This monolithic approach completely eliminates the severe internal alignment issues associated with all traditional (i.e. hand-assembled) blade traps

The main objective of this program is to design and fabricate an advanced monolithic 3D blade-type ion trap, which should provide capabilities that go significantly beyond the present state-of-the art.  Our design incorporates features that should radically improve trap operational capabilities over today’s standards. The trapping zone will incorporate spatially distinctive sections that are each optimized for performing a specific task. This provides a capability that, so far, has been offered only by a few surface traps. Furthermore, unlike surface traps, our 3D design will offer advantages such as low heating rates, very efficient screening from stray electric fields, deep trapping potentials, and broad optical access. Our design will also include a means to efficiently dissipate heat, as required for stable trapping fields and reliable entangling operations. During Phase II, monolithic 3D blade traps will be quantitatively  characterized using trapped-ions. Data will be collected at Rice University and Duke University. Having two evaluation sites is a major element of this program, and eventually will be of great commercial value. Trap metallization will be optimized to ensure long-term reliability