Quantum stability of an ion in a Paul trap revisited

ABSTRACT

We study the quantum stability of the dynamics of ions in a Paul trap. We revisit previous results   that showed that quantum trajectories did not have the same region of stability as their classical counterpart, contrary to what is obtained from a Floquet analysis of the motion in the periodic trapping field. Using numerical simulations of the full wave-packet dynamics, we confirm that the classical trapping criterion is fully applicable to quantum motion, when considering both the expectation value of the position of the wave packet and its width.

KEYWORDS:

• Ion trapping
• Paul trap
• stability

Acknowledgments

The simulations were performed on resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the High Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support from Umeå University is gratefully acknowledged.