R. Dubessy

The text below was written during two visits that Daniel Segal made at Universit{é} Paris 13. Danny stayed at Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers the summers of 2008 and 2009 to participate in the exploration of a novel lead in the field of ultra-high resolution spectroscopy. Our idea was to probe trapped molecular ions using Quantum Logic Spectroscopy (QLS) in order to advance our understanding of a variety of fundamental processes in nature. At that time, QLS, a ground-breaking spectroscopic technique, had only been demonstrated with atomic ions. Our ultimategoals were new approaches to the observation of parity violation in chiral molecules and tests of time variations of the fundamental constants. This text is the original research proposal written eight years ago. We have added a series of notes to revisit it in the light of what has been since realized in the field.

We designed and operated a surface ion trap, with an ion-substrate distance of 500\mum, realized with standard printed-circuit-board techniques. The trap has been loaded with up to a few thousand Sr+ ions in the Coulomb-crystal regime. An analytical model of the pseudo-potential allowed us to determine the parameters that drive the trap into anisotropic regimes in which we obtain large (N>150) purely 2D ion Coulomb crystals. These crystals may open a simple and reliable way to experiments on quantum simulations of large 2D systems.