An ion trap apparatus with high optical access in multiple directions.

Optical controls provided by lasers are the most important and essential techniques in trapped ion and cold atom systems. It is crucial to increase the optical accessibility of the setup to enhance these optical capabilities. Here, we present the design and construction of a new segmented-blade ion trap integrated with a compact glass vacuum cell, in place of the conventional bulky metal vacuum chamber. The distance between the ion and four outside surfaces of the glass cell is 15 mm, which enables us to install four high-numerical-aperture (NA) lenses (with two NA ⩽ 0.32 lenses and two NA ⩽ 0.66 lenses) in two orthogonal transverse directions, while leaving enough space for laser beams in the oblique and longitudinal directions. The high optical accessibility in multiple directions allows the application of small laser spots for addressable Raman operations, programmable optical tweezer arrays, and efficient fluorescence collection simultaneously. We have successfully loaded and cooled a string of Yb and Yb ions in the trap, which verifies the trapping stability. This compact high-optical-access trap setup not only can be used as an extendable module for quantum information processing but also facilitates experimental studies on quantum chemistry in a cold hybrid ion-atom system.