Numerical Simulations of 3D Ion Crystal Dynamics in a Penning Trap using the Fast Multipole Method

Published

April 8, 2025

Author(s)

John Zaris, Wes Johnson, Athreya Shankar, John Bollinger, Scott Parker

Abstract

We simulate the dynamics, including laser cooling, of 3D ion crystals confined in a Penning trap using a newly developed molecular dynamics-like code. The numerical integration of the ions' equations of motion is accelerated using the fast multipole method to calculate the Coulomb interaction between ions, which allows us to efficiently study large ion crystals with thousands of ions. In particular, we show that the simulation time scales directly with ion number, rather than with the square of the ion number. By treating the ions' absorption of photons as a Poisson process, we simulate individual photon scattering events to study laser cooling of 3D ellipsoid ion crystals. Initial simulations suggest that these crystals can be efficiently cooled to temperatures of several millikelvin within several milliseconds, owing to the mixing of the easily cooled axial motional modes with the planar motional modes. This suggests that 3D ion crystals could be well-suited as platforms for future quantum information experiments.

Citation

Journal of Plasma Physics

Volume

91

Issue

2

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

3D ion crystals, fast multipole method simulations, laser cooling simulations, Penning trap

Citation

Zaris, J. , Johnson, W. , Shankar, A. , Bollinger, J. and Parker, S. (2025), Numerical Simulations of 3D Ion Crystal Dynamics in a Penning Trap using the Fast Multipole Method, Journal of Plasma Physics, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=957932 (Accessed October 2, 2025)