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Concept
Quadrupole ion trap
Summary
In experimental physics, a quadrupole ion trap or paul trap is a type of ion trap that uses dynamic electric fields to trap charged particles. They are also called radio frequency (RF) traps or Paul traps in honor of Wolfgang Paul, who invented the device and shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for this work. It is used as a component of a mass spectrometer or a trapped ion quantum computer.
A charged particle, such as an atomic or molecular ion, feels a force from an electric field. It is not possible to create a static configuration of electric fields that traps the charged particle in all three directions (this restriction is known as Earnshaw's theorem). It is possible, however, to create an average confining force in all three directions by use of electric fields that change in time. To do so, the confining and anti-confining directions are switched at a rate faster than it takes the particle to escape the trap. The traps are also called "radio frequency" traps because the switching rate is often at a radio frequency.
The quadrupole is the simplest electric field geometry used in such traps, though more complicated geometries are possible for specialized devices. The electric fields are generated from electric potentials on metal electrodes. A pure quadrupole is created from hyperbolic electrodes, though cylindrical electrodes are often used for ease of fabrication. Microfabricated ion traps exist where the electrodes lie in a plane with the trapping region above the plane. There are two main classes of traps, depending on whether the oscillating field provides confinement in three or two dimensions. In the two-dimension case (a so-called "linear RF trap"), confinement in the third direction is provided by static electric fields.
The 3D trap itself generally consists of two hyperbolic metal electrodes with their foci facing each other and a hyperbolic ring electrode halfway between the other two electrodes. The ions are trapped in the space between these three electrodes by AC (oscillating) and DC (static) electric fields.
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