Cryogenic silicon surface ion trap

Trapped ions are pre-eminent candidates for building quantum information processors and quantum simulators. To scale such systems to more than a few tens of ions it is important to tackle the observed high ion-heating rates and create scalable trap structures which can be simply and reliably produced. Here, we report on cryogenically operated intrinsic-silicon ion traps which can be rapidly and easily fabricated using standard semiconductor technologies. Single Ca-40(+) ions have been trapped and used to characterize the trap operation. Long ion lifetimes were observed with the traps exhibiting heating rates as low as (n) over bar (v)over dot = 0.33 phonons s(-1) at an ion-electrode distance of 230 mu m. These results open many new avenues to arrays of micro-fabricated ion traps.