“…The study of interactions between neutral atoms and ions is a highly topical and promising area of research at the intersection of several disciplines including atomic physics, chemistry and quantum simulations [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Many current experiments exploit combinations of established trapping methods, building on the concept of ion-atom hybrid traps first demonstrated by Smith et al in 2005 [1], and have revealed interesting effects and phenomena such as sympathetic cooling [4,5,8,9,11,[13][14][15][16][17][18], state-to-state chemistry [19], non-Maxwellian and superstatistical energy distributions [20,21], charge exchange and transfer [22,23], and ion-atom Feshbach resonances [18]. Despite this rapid progress, one of the problems encountered in most experiments suitable for studying generic combinations of ion and atom species is related to the fact that they employ radiofrequency (rf) fields to confine ions.…”