After Doppler cooling, ions often form Coulomb crystals in the trap. This unusual state of matter allows an assembly of ions to be treated as a single quantum mechanical system. Coulomb crystals are used in many types of experiments with trapped ions because they have very well controlled properties, for example, the ions are well isolated from the environment and do not interact with each other except through the Coulomb interaction, which ensures that they remain far apart from each other. The structure is very stable and in some cases the quantum states of individual ions can be manipulated.
A short review of ion Coulomb crystals and their applications is given in reference [1].
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References:
[1] Thompson R C. Ion Coulomb crystals, Contemporary Physics. 2015;56: 63-79. doi: 10.1080/00107514.2014.989715.
[2] Mavadia S, Goodwin JF, Stutter G, Bharadia S, Crick D R, Segal D M, Thompson R C. Control of the conformations of ion Coulomb crystals in a Penning trap, Nature Communications. 2013;4: 2571. doi: 10.1038/ncomms3571.
[3] Goodwin J F, Brown B J, Stutter G, Dale H, Thompson R C, Rudolph T. Trapped-ion quantum error-correcting protocols using only global operations, Physical Review A. 2015;92(3): 032314. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevA.92.032314.
[4] Stutter G, Hrmo P, Jarlaud V, Joshi M K, Goodwin J F, Thompson R C. Sideband cooling of small ion Coulomb crystals in a Penning trap, Journal of Modern Optics. 2018;65(5-6): 549-559. doi: 10.1080/09500340.2017.1376719.
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