Migrating an Ion Trap Experiment to ARTIQ: Pitfalls and Community Contributions

ARTIQ offers a modernized solution to hardware and software control over ion trapping experiments [1]. Prior to ARTIQ, many ion trapping setups, including those at GTRI, have successfully employed in-house-developed experiment controllers that require customized programming suites for operation. However, as ion-trap experiments grow more complex, it will be advantageous to employ a more standard solution. Some of the disadvantages to our current experiment control setup include the time and cost of building custom hardware, the limited number of personnel available to uncover and fix bugs, and the use of an obscure scripting language which makes leveraging open-source libraries for hardware control and data analysis challenging. Here we discuss our work to migrate a fully working ion trap from existing equipment to an ARTIQ build. ARTIQ is still in active development, and while there is good documentation online, there is a lack of complete tutorials and examples. This means that mistakes are likely when developing an experimental framework, and we address the pitfalls we have encountered. We also discuss our development of drivers for external devices not currently found within the ARTIQ community, such as for the National Instruments PXIe-5413 DAC, a COTS device which has enabled DC electrode control at clock speeds of 20 MHz in our experiments.

[1] https://m-labs.hk/experiment-control/artiq/