Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Trapped electrons and ions as particle detectors

Published

Author(s)

Jacob Taylor, Daniel Carney, Hartmut Haffner, David Moore

Abstract

Electrons and ions trapped with electromagnetic fields have long served as important high- precision metrological instruments, and more recently have also been proposed as a platform for quantum information processing. Here we point out that these systems can also be used as highly sensitive detectors of passing charged particles, due to the combination of their extreme charge-to- mass ratio and low-noise quantum readout and control. As an illustration, we show that current devices can be used to provide competitive sensitivity to models where ambient dark matter particles carry small electric millicharges ≪ e. Our calculations may also be useful in the characterization of noise in quantum computers coming from backgrounds of charged particles.
Citation
Physical Review Letters

Keywords

ion trap, particle detector, penning trap, paul trap

Citation

Taylor, J. , Carney, D. , Haffner, H. and Moore, D. (2021), Trapped electrons and ions as particle detectors, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.061804, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=932245 (Accessed October 15, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created August 5, 2021, Updated December 9, 2022