Progress Towards Trapping and Cooling of Barium-133

Barium-133 has often been called the "Goldilocks Qubit" because of all the advantages it has over other trapped-ion qubit species. The nuclear spin of 1/2 provides a hyperfine splitting without the magnetic sensitivity of a nuclear spin of 3/2, the vast majority of the lasers used for quantum operations on it are in the visible spectrum, which are safer and have much more readily available optical components, and it has an extremely high State Preparation and Measurement (SPAM) fidelity (Christensen, 2018). Here we demonstrate our progress towards making a barium-133 chamber and all the accompanying optics and imaging systems, as well as laser cooling it. We look forward to the new opportunities for experimentation with the new qubit species we have access to. We will take full advantage of the efforts of our colleagues at AFRL with photonics chips to replace bulk optics. We also will observe background free state detection. Additionally, using two chambers allows us to network the barium qubits across the two chambers. Approved for Public Release; Distribution Unlimited: AFRL-2023-6141