Electronics of an ion trap with integrated time-of-flight mass spectrometer

• We report on the development of electronics for an RF trap with integrated TOFMS.
• The electronics allows for formation of ion Coulomb crystals in the RF trap.
• Ion samples are extracted radially from the RF trap into the very compact TOFMS.
• The system achieves isotopic resolution with a mass resolution >500.
• The apparatus is designed for atomic physics experiments with cold atoms and ions.

Recently, we reported an ion trap experiment with an integrated time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOFMS) [1] focusing on the improvement of mass resolution and detection limit due to sample preparation at millikelvin temperatures. The system utilizes a radio-frequency (RF) ion trap with asymmetric drive for storing and manipulating laser-cooled ions and features radial extraction into a compact 275 mm long TOF drift tube. The mass resolution exceeds m/Δm = 500, which provides isotopic resolution over the whole mass range of interest in current experiments and constitutes an improvement of almost an order of magnitude over other implementations. In this article, we discuss the experimental implementation in detail, which is comprised of newly developed drive electronics for generating the required voltages to operate RF trap and TOFMS, as well as control electronics for regulating RF outputs and synchronizing the TOFMS extraction.

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