Abstract
Abstract: At the beginning I will describe three kinds of traps the Paul Trap and the Benning Trap, and the Electrostatic Trap. In chapter, I will first talk about the general theory of the Paul trap. I will describe the movement of calcium ions (Ca+) in the trap and talk about its atomic laser cooling and about stability and instability regions. In chapter 2 I will give a detailed description of our experimental setup (King Khalid University Trap) or (KKU Trap). It was tuned by King Abdul-Aziz City of Science and Technology (KACST). In this project we plan to build an annular Paul trap and study its potential application in the detection of the rare isotope 41Ca. After discussing with our consultant Prof. Gilles, this system was designed and built and then sent it to Atomic and Molecular Physics Lab in the department of physics of King Khalid University. The vacuum system, the detector, and the electronics were purchased from expert companies such as Stahl Electronics and Toptica which provided us the RF amplifier and two diode lasers respectively.f A general layout of the experiment shows 4 parts: The ion source, the Paul trap, the ion detector and the lasers. This will have important applications in the fields of biomedical sciences, stellar evolution, nucleo-synthesis, and environmental sciences. We will use commercial laser systems based on laser diodes to cool the trapped ions. The ions will be detected from their Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) signal using a photomultiplier and, with a Microchannel Plate (MCP) detector. We will study the effect of the trapping voltages on the different isotopes of natural calcium and measure the ions oscillation frequencies as functions of these voltages. The experimental parameters have been optimized. The number of trapped ions as function of the trapping time has been counted. It follows an exponential decay function with the lifetime of 0.315sec
