UC Riverside

Ion traps are one of the most mature physical platforms for quantum information processing. The mainstream two-qubit gate of trapped ion qubits depends on the secular motional frequency, which is the main bottleneck for the speed of trapped ion qubits. This inspired the idea to trap electrons, particles with a much smaller mass than ions, to improve the speed of gates. Electrons also have other advantages such as a natural two-level system and laser-free detection and manipulation, but they also face challenges in high RF frequencies and new schemes for cooling and detection. In this dissertation, I designed and realized a monolithic PCB linear Paul trap with a half-wave resonator with a resonance frequency of ∼1.7 GHz, and 20 DC electrodes with tracks of equal length for multipole control, which eliminates the need of mechanical assembly and would be beneficial to cryogenic experiments. The design is validated by ANSYS HFSS simulation for the resonator and Maxwell simulation for the electrode control. Using this monolithic PCB trap design, we successfully trapped electrons, characterized the dependence of trapping signals on experimental parameters, and investigated the stray field and trapping thresholds. We also conducted thorough measurements of the electrons’ motional frequencies and lifetimes. We found axial motional frequencies of the electrons up to 2π×55 MHz and radial motional frequencies up to 2π×90 MHz, as well as a lifetime of 2.13 ms. In addition, I introduced ideas to improve the trap design and presented an outlook for cryogenic trapping and non-destructive spin readout of trapped electrons.