Surface Treatment of Ion Traps

Trapped ions are one of the most advanced candidate systems for a scalable quantum processing device. The next exciting step towards this goal is to trap small ion strings in a multitude of traps and connect them by shuttling ions between the traps. Such traps should be as small as possible allowing for compactness, large shuttling speed, and high processing speed. In this project, we study electric field noise emerging from the trap electrodes as this noise leads to heating of the ion motion and interferes with the most popular quantum gates for trapped ions. In order to attack this problem, we combine an ion trap with variable temperature together with surface cleaning and analyzation tools.