In need of an experienced manufacturer to fabricate your micro-structured ion trap design?
Look no further. Translume has worked with research leaders around the world to fabricate their designs for 2D and 3D ion traps.
Translume has developed proprietary processes to fabricate surface and volumetric micro-structured ion traps. These traps are made from fused silica glass, a material with excellent electrical properties for trapping.
Our demonstrated microfabrication capability is compatible with many designs, including Paul traps and Penning traps. Translume’s expertise in materials and machining combined with customer-provided leading-edge designs has resulted in state-of-the-art ion traps, with outstanding physical and performance characteristics.
We have fabricated and delivered to collaborators and commercial customers a variety of microtrap platforms, including some with optical access ports, and ion loading ports.
Contact us to learn more about microtraps and our unique microtrap platform fabrication capabilities.
Custom Traps Fabricated by Translume - A Few Case Studies
Custom-design Considerations
Translume can help you fabricating your traps more quickly and reliably, in order to get your quantum research projects underway sooner and more economically.
Translume’ s expertise will reduce the time and errors that occur when fabricating high performance ion traps. Fabricating your own trap is likely to be educational and may sound exciting, but the stark reality is that most quantum scientists that have fabricated their own traps have found that this typically takes much more time and effort than planned.
There are several critical elements to consider when evaluating whether to order a custom trap. The list below discusses just a few of them.
Consideration #1 - Translume is a trap fabricator, not a trapping expert
Translume can help you – but only to a certain extent. It should be understood that Translume’s expertise applies specifically to the fabrication of the trap – we are not end-users, and we have little relevant experience with vacuum systems, atomic vapors sources, or the like. However, we can certainly assist you with the fabrication of your trap.
Consideration #2 – What you absolutely need
We have a considerable amount of experience fabricating ion traps, yet depending on the complexity of the design, fabricating a novel custom trap can be quite a long and costly undertaking. Over-specifying the number of critical dimensions can greatly increase the trap fabrication complexity, while not improving the trap performance. Decide what you absolutely need to have versus what would be nice to have. For example, in most traps, the symmetry and the parallelism of the electrodes are critical factors, while the exact distance from the trapped ions to the closest electrode is often not as critical.
Consideration #3, #4, #...
There are more considerations that may be critical to your design. The detail of electrode isolation scheme is just one example to think about. As you reflect on your specific needs, please contact us directly to discuss your design.