Dynamics Simulation and Light-Sheet Tomography of Multispecies Ion Coulomb Crystals

Abstract

Ions in coulomb crystals are sufficiently cooled and well isolated from the environment, which makes them an ideal platform for the research of high precision spectroscopy. Ion coulomb crystals (ICC) constituted by multispecies ions can provide important information about the nucleus, such as isotope shifts and hyperfine splittings. In order to extract the spectroscopic data with a high precision, the status of ICC needs to be properly evaluated. In this paper, we utilize the molecular dynamics simulation software LAMMPS and the (py) Lion package to simulate the dynamics of ICC with multispecies ions. To make a better comparison between the simulation results and experimental observations, we propose an ICC tomography scheme with the fluorescence light-sheet microscopy. This work can be applied to make better estimation on dynamic parameters of both laser cooled and sympathetically cooled ions.