Today, our article entitled “Dynamics of an unbalanced two-ion crystal in a Penning trap for application in optical mass spectrometry” by M. J. Gutiérrez, J. Berrocal, F. Domínguez, I. Arrazola, M. Block, E. Solano, and D. Rodríguez has been published in the journal Physical Review A.

Link to the publication: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.100.063415

In the article we have thoroughly studied the dynamics of an unbalanced two-ion crystal (comprised of a “target” and a “sensor” ion) confined in a Penning trap along the magnetic-field axis in order to determine the “target” ion's free-cyclotron frequency from the crystal eigenmode frequencies. We also analyze the frequency shifts arising from the Coulomb interaction, as a function of phonon number assuming that the crystal is cooled to the ground state.