Penning trap

A Penning trap is a device for the storage of charged

particles using a homogeneous magnetic field and a
quadrupole electric field. It is mostly found in the physical
sciences and related fields of study for precision
measurements of properties of ions and stable subatomic
particles, like for example mass,[1] fission yields and isomeric A cylindrical version of a Penning trap,
yield ratios. One initial object of study was the so-called with open endcaps to permit axial
geonium atoms, which represent a way to measure the access. B indicates the magnetic field,
electron magnetic moment by storing a single electron. These and E indicates the electric field used for
storage of the particles in the trap centre.
traps have been used in the physical realization of quantum
computation and quantum information processing by trapping
qubits. Penning traps are in use in many laboratories worldwide, including CERN, to store and investigate
anti-particles such as antiprotons.[2] The main advantages of Penning traps are the potentially long
storage times and the existence of a multitude of techniques to manipulate and non-destructively detect
the stored particles.[3][4] This makes Penning traps versatile for the investigation of stored particles, but
also for their selection, preparation or mere storage.

History
The Penning trap was named after F. M. Penning (1894–1953) by Hans Georg Dehmelt (1922–2017) who
built the first trap. Dehmelt got inspiration from the vacuum gauge built by F. M. Penning where a current
through a discharge tube in a magnetic field is proportional to the pressure. Citing from H. Dehmelt's
autobiography:[5]

"I began to focus on the magnetron/Penning discharge

geometry, which, in the Penning ion gauge, had
caught my interest already at Göttingen and at Duke.
In their 1955 cyclotron resonance work on
photoelectrons in vacuum Franken and Liebes had
reported undesirable frequency shifts caused by
accidental electron trapping. Their analysis made me
realize that in a pure electric quadrupole field the shift
Sectional view of a hyperbolic
would not depend on the location of the electron in
Penning trap as used by Dehmelt,
the trap. This is an important advantage over many
with electric and magnetic field lines
other traps that I decided to exploit. A magnetron trap indicated.
of this type had been briefly discussed in J.R. Pierce's
1949 book, and I developed a simple description of
the axial, magnetron, and cyclotron motions of an
electron in it. With the help of the expert glassblower
 of the Department, Jake Jonson, I built my first high vacuum
soon able to trap electrons for about 10 sec and to detect
resonances." – H. Dehmelt

H. Dehmelt shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for the development of the ion trap technique.

Operation
Penning traps use a strong homogeneous axial magnetic field to confine particles radially and a
quadrupole electric field to confine the particles axially.[6] The static electric potential can be generated
using a set of three electrodes: a ring and two endcaps. In an ideal Penning trap the ring and endcaps are
hyperboloids of revolution. For trapping of positive (negative) ions, the endcap electrodes are kept at a
positive (negative) potential relative to the ring. This potential produces a saddle point in the centre of the
trap, which traps ions along the axial direction. The electric field causes ions to oscillate (harmonically in
the case of an ideal Penning trap) along the trap axis. The magnetic field in combination with the electric
field causes charged particles to move in the radial plane with a motion which traces out an epitrochoid.

The orbital motion of ions in the radial plane is composed of two modes at frequencies which are called
the magnetron and the modified cyclotron frequencies. These motions are similar to the deferent
and epicycle, respectively, of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system.

The sum of these two frequencies is the cyclotron frequency,

which depends only on the ratio of electric charge to mass
and on the strength of the magnetic field. This frequency can
be measured very accurately and can be used to measure the
masses of charged particles. Many of the highest-precision
mass measurements (masses of the electron, proton, 2H, 20Ne
and 28Si) come from Penning traps.

Buffer gas cooling, resistive cooling, and laser cooling are

techniques to remove energy from ions in a Penning trap.
Buffer gas cooling relies on collisions between the ions and
neutral gas molecules that bring the ion energy closer to the
energy of the gas molecules. In resistive cooling, moving
image charges in the electrodes are made to do work through
A classical trajectory in the radial plane an external resistor, effectively removing energy from the
for ions. Laser cooling can be used to remove energy from some
kinds of ions in Penning traps. This technique requires ions
with an appropriate electronic structure. Radiative cooling is
the process by which the ions lose energy by creating electromagnetic waves by virtue of their
acceleration in the magnetic field. This process dominates the cooling of electrons in Penning traps, but is
very small and usually negligible for heavier particles.
Using the Penning trap can have advantages over the radio frequency trap (Paul trap). Firstly, in the
Penning trap only static fields are applied and therefore there is no micro-motion and resultant heating of
the ions due to the dynamic fields, even for extended 2- and 3-dimensional ion Coulomb crystals. Also,
the Penning trap can be made larger whilst maintaining strong trapping. The trapped ion can then be held
further away from the electrode surfaces. Interaction with patch potentials on the electrode surfaces can
be responsible for heating and decoherence effects and these effects scale as a high power of the inverse
distance between the ion and the electrode.

Fourier-transform mass spectrometry

Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (also known as Fourier-transform mass
spectrometry) is a type of mass spectrometry used for determining the mass-to-charge ratio (m/z) of ions
based on the cyclotron frequency of the ions in a fixed magnetic field.[7] The ions are trapped in a
Penning trap where they are excited to a larger cyclotron radius by an oscillating electric field
perpendicular to the magnetic field. The excitation also results in the ions moving in phase (in a packet).
The signal is detected as an image current on a pair of plates which the packet of ions passes close to as
they cyclotron. The resulting signal is called a free induction decay (fid), transient or interferogram that
consists of a superposition of sine waves. The useful signal is extracted from this data by performing a
Fourier transform to give a mass spectrum.

Single ions can be investigated in a Penning trap held at a temperature of 4 K. For this the ring electrode
is segmented and opposite electrodes are connected to a superconducting coil and the source and the gate
of a field-effect transistor. The coil and the parasitic capacitances of the circuit form a LC circuit with a Q
of about 50 000. The LC circuit is excited by an external electric pulse. The segmented electrodes couple
the motion of the single electron to the LC circuit. Thus the energy in the LC circuit in resonance with the
ion slowly oscillates between the many electrons (10000) in the gate of the field effect transistor and the
single electron. This can be detected in the signal at the drain of the field effect transistor.

Geonium atom
A geonium atom is a pseudo-atomic system that consists of a single electron or ion stored in a Penning
trap which is 'bound' to the remaining Earth, hence the term 'geonium'.[6] The name was coined by H.G.
Dehmelt.[8]

In the typical case, the trapped system consists of only one particle or ion. Such a quantum system is
determined by quantum states of one particle, like in the hydrogen atom. Hydrogen consists of two
particles, the nucleus and electron, but the electron motion relative to the nucleus is equivalent to one
particle in an external field, see center-of-mass frame.

The properties of geonium are different from a typical atom. The charge undergoes cyclotron motion
around the trap axis and oscillates along the axis. An inhomogeneous magnetic "bottle field" is applied to
measure the quantum properties by the "continuous Stern-Gerlach" technique. Energy levels and g-factor
of the particle can be measured with high precision.[8] Van Dyck, et al. explored the magnetic splitting of
geonium spectra in 1978 and in 1987 published high-precision measurements of electron and positron g-
factors, which constrained the electron radius.

Single particle
In November 2017, an international team of scientists isolated a single proton in a Penning trap in order
to measure its magnetic moment to the highest precision to date.[9] It was found to be
2.792 847 344 62(82) nuclear magnetons. The CODATA 2018 value matches this.[10]

References
1. Eronen, T.; Kolhinen, V. S.; Elomaa, V. -V.; Gorelov, D.; Hager, U.; Hakala, J.; Jokinen, A.;
Kankainen, A.; Karvonen, P.; Kopecky, S.; Moore, I. D. (2012-04-18). "JYFLTRAP: a
Penning trap for precision mass spectroscopy and isobaric purification" ([Link]
40/epja/i2012-12046-1). The European Physical Journal A. 48 (4): 46.
Bibcode:2012EPJA...48...46E ([Link]
doi:10.1140/epja/i2012-12046-1 ([Link]
ISSN 1434-601X ([Link] S2CID 119825256 ([Link]
[Link]/CorpusID:119825256).
2. "Penning Trap | ALPHA Experiment" ([Link]
[Link]. Retrieved 5 March 2019.
3. Major, F. G. (2005). Charged particle traps : physics and techniques of charged particle field
confinement ([Link] V. N. Gheorghe, G. Werth. Berlin:
Springer. ISBN 3-540-22043-7. OCLC 62771233 ([Link]
3).
4. Vogel, Manuel (2018). Particle confinement in Penning traps : an introduction ([Link]
[Link]/oclc/1030303331). Cham, Switzerland. ISBN 978-3-319-76264-7.
OCLC 1030303331 ([Link]
5. "Hans G. Dehmelt - Biographical" ([Link]
s/1989/[Link]). Nobel Prize. 1989. Retrieved June 1, 2014.
6. Brown, L.S.; Gabrielse, G. (1986). "Geonium theory: Physics of a single electron or ion in a
Penning trap" ([Link]
[Link]/gabrielse/papers/1986/[Link]) (PDF). Reviews of Modern Physics. 58 (1): 233–
311. Bibcode:1986RvMP...58..233B ([Link]
B). doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.58.233 ([Link]
Archived from the original ([Link]
[Link]) (PDF) on 2017-03-13. Retrieved 2014-05-01.
7. Marshall, A. G.; Hendrickson, C. L.; Jackson, G. S. (1998). "Fourier transform ion cyclotron
resonance mass spectrometry: A primer" ([Link]
d=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=9768511). Mass Spectrometry Reviews.
17 (1): 1–35. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-2787(1998)17:1<1::AID-MAS1>[Link];2-K ([Link]
[Link]/10.1002%2F%28SICI%291098-2787%281998%2917%3A1%3C1%3A%3AAID-MAS
1%[Link]%3B2-K). PMID 9768511 ([Link]
8. Dehmelt, Hans (1988). "A single atomic particle forever floating at rest in free space: New
value for electron radius". Physica Scripta. T22: 102–110. Bibcode:1988PhST...22..102D (ht
tps://[Link]/abs/1988PhST...22..102D). doi:10.1088/0031-
8949/1988/T22/016 ([Link]
S2CID 250760629 ([Link]
 9. Schneider, Georg; Mooser, Andreas; Bohman, Matthew; et al. (2017). "Double-trap
measurement of the proton magnetic moment at 0.3 parts per billion precision" ([Link]
g/10.1126%2Fscience.aan0207). Science. 358 (6366): 1081–1084.
Bibcode:2017Sci...358.1081S ([Link]
doi:10.1126/science.aan0207 ([Link]
PMID 29170238 ([Link]
10. "2018 CODATA Value: proton magnetic moment to nuclear magneton ratio" ([Link]
[Link]/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?mupsmun). The NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and
Uncertainty. NIST. Retrieved 2020-04-19.

External links
Nobel Prize in Physics 1989 ([Link]
The High-precision Penning Trap Mass Spectrometer SMILETRAP in Stockholm, Sweden (h
ttps://[Link]/web/20020924223038/[Link]
High-precision mass determination of unstable nuclei with a Penning trap mass
spectrometer at ISOLDE/CERN, Switzerland ([Link]
High-precision mass measurements of rare isotopes using the LEBIT and SIPT Penning
traps at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, USA ([Link]
du/lebit/)
High-precision mass measurements of short-lived isotopes using the TITAN Penning trap at
TRIUMF in Vancouver, Canada ([Link]

Retrieved from "[Link]