A traditional approach to generating the colors required for experiments with 9Be + has been to frequency double 100-500 mW red output from a ring dye laser operating near 626 nm. For instance, semiconductor diode lasers - appreciated for their relatively low technical complexity and cost - do not extend appreciably below ∼370 nm using GaN-based diodes. The primary transitions in Beryllium near 313 nm mandate tunable, high-power, narrow-linewidth, low-drift CW lasers in a wavelength range that is not well covered by commercial products. ( 2012).ĭespite these advantages, the technical complexity of laser systems required for 9Be + trapping has reduced the uptake of this species in new experimental laboratories. A large number of interesting experiments leveraging these capabilities has been conducted using 9Be +, ranging from quantum computing and quantum simulation to precision frequency metrology and sensing Bollinger et al. ( 1998) to the experimentalist: the light mass of 9Be + results in high motional frequencies in RF pseudopotential traps, the low atomic number provides a relatively simple level structure, the presence of strong cycling transition enables high-fidelity state detection and efficient cooling, and the presence of field-insensitive clock transitions can provide long-lived qubit coherences (10s of seconds) Langer ( 2006). Among the wide variety of trapped ion species in use, Beryllium provides significant advantages Wineland et al. Leibfried ( 2011b)as needed in large-scale quantum computation. ( 1995), exceptionally long coherence times Wineland and Blatt ( 2008), and high-fidelity operations Wineland et al. Key developments include proposals and experiments to implement quantum logic gates Cirac and Zoller ( 1995) Monroe et al. Over the past several decades trapped ions have emerged as a powerful architecture for breakthrough research into quantum information, computation and simulation James ( 1998) Wineland and Blatt ( 2008) Wineland and Leibfried ( 2009). We believe that this simple laser system addresses a key need in the ion trapping community and dramatically reduces the cost and complexity associated with Beryllium ion trapping experiments. In this way the entirety of the slave output power is available for frequency doubling, while analysis may be performed on the master output. In order to improve nonlinear frequency conversion efficiency, we achieve larger useful power via injection locking of a slave laser. In our setup, involving multiple stages of thermoelectric cooling, we are able to obtain ≈130 mW near 626 nm, sufficient for efficient frequency doubling to the required Doppler cooling wavelengths near 313nm in ionized Beryllium. A commercial single-mode laser diode with rated power output of 170 mW at 635nm is cooled to ≈ − 31 C, and a single longitudinal mode is selected via the Littrow configuration. We describe a high-power, frequency-tunable, external cavity diode laser (ECDL) system near 626nm useful for laser cooling of trapped 9Be + ions.
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