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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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23 records · Page 2

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NASA NTRS2015

Demonstration of Long Vacuum Integrity Lifetime of Trapped Ion Standard Package

A compact Hg ion trap package that was vacuum-sealed since 9 years has been demonstrated to be successfully operational showing excellent ion-trap lifetime exceeding 400 days. In addition to the vacuum package, the same 9-year old optical and detection packages are utilized to obtain these results. Charge transfer relaxation effects between neutral Hg and trapped Hg ion are studied. This work shows the reliability of such units in view of next-generation ground and space-borne trapped ion clocks.

charge-transfer relaxation↗

DOE OSTI2024

Synthesis of cerium precursors with alkoxide ligands for degradation to cerium oxide nanoparticles

Lanthanide oxide and sulfide nanoparticles present intriguing theoretical questions regarding their electronic structures, alongside numerous potential applications in material science and catalysis. Although these materials can be formed through hydrolysis, their synthesis via thermolysis is crucial for nanoscale materials and practical applications. This research aims to enhance our understanding of the decomposition mechanisms by focusing on cerium compounds, which are analogous to those studied previously. Currently, our knowledge of the decomposition mechanisms of cerium alkoxide precursors is limited. The objective of this project is to develop a mechanistic understanding of the formation of cerium oxide nanoparticles from cerium alkoxide precursors, employing a variety of techniques. These techniques include collision-induced dissociation in an ion-trap mass spectrometer, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis coupled with differential scanning calorimetry (TGA-DSC), and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to investigate the decomposition mechanisms of the synthesized precursors.

37 - INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL AND ANALYTICAL C↗

DOE OSTI2024

Producing two-dimensional dust clouds and clusters using a movable electrode for complex plasma and fundamental physics experiments

We report a Bidirectional Electrode Control Arm Assembly (BECAA) for precisely manipulating dust clouds levitated above the powered electrode in RF plasmas. The reported techniques allow the creation of perfectly 2D dust layers by eliminating off-plane particles by moving the electrode from outside the plasma chamber without altering the plasma conditions. Here, the tilting and moving of electrodes using BECAA also allows the precise and repeatable elimination of dust particles one by one to achieve any desired number of grains N without trial and error. Simultaneously acquired top and side view images of dust clusters show that they are perfectly planar or 2D. A demonstration of clusters with N = 1–28 without changing the plasma conditions is presented to show the utility of BECAA for complex plasma and statistical physics experimental design. Demonstration videos and 3D printable part files are available for easy reproduction and adaptation of this new method to repeatably produce 2D clusters in existing RF plasma chambers.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Fault localization in a microfabricated surface ion trap using diamond nitrogen-vacancy center magnetometry

Here, as quantum computing hardware becomes more complex with ongoing design innovations and growing capabilities, the quantum computing community needs increasingly powerful techniques for fabrication failure root-cause analysis. This is especially true for trapped-ion quantum computing. As trapped-ion quantum computing aims to scale to thousands of ions, the electrode numbers are growing to several hundred, with likely integrated photonic components also adding to the electrical and fabrication complexity, making faults even harder to locate. In this work, we used a high-resolution quantum magnetic imaging technique, based on nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, to investigate short-circuit faults in an ion trap chip. We imaged currents from these short-circuit faults to ground and compared them to intentionally created faults, finding that the root cause of the faults was failures in the on-chip trench capacitors. This work, where we exploited the performance advantages of a quantum magnetic sensing technique to troubleshoot a piece of quantum computing hardware, is a unique example of the evolving synergy between emerging quantum technologies to achieve capabilities that were previously inaccessible.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DOE OSTI2025

Performance of 3 cm 3 ion trap vacuum package sealed for 10 years

Miniature atomic clocks based on the interrogation of the ground state hyperfine splitting of buffer gas cooled ions confined in radio frequency Paul traps have shown great promise as high precision prototype clocks. We report on the performance of two miniature ion trap vacuum packages after being sealed for as much as 10 years. We find the lifetime of the ions within the trap has increased over time for both traps and can be as long as 50 days. We form two clocks using the two traps and compare their relative frequency instability one with another to demonstrate a short-term instability of 5×10 -13 $τ$ -1/2 integrating down to 1×10 -14 after 2 ks of integration. The trapped ion lifetime and clock instability demonstrated by these miniature devices despite only being passively pumped for many years represents a critical advance toward their proliferation in the clock community.

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS↗