Coupling single ions to optical cavities

The integration of optical cavities with linear ion traps is an important technology to enable high rate of probabilistic entanglement between ions in different nodes of networked quantum information processing systems. However, due to the strong interaction between the dielectric of the cavity mirrors and the trapping field, current systems have cavity lengths of several mm.
This project will investigate the integration of optical fibre cavities into linear ion trap structures to achieve high ion-cavity coupling to facilitate efficient ion-photon entanglement. Reducing the electrode spacing of the ion trap and the size of the dielectric mirrors cavity length on the order of 100s um are feasible. The main focus will be on designing, setting up and testing a system based on the NPL wafer trap.