Ion trap
Trampa iónica
- Date
- 1953 · confidence high
- Place
- Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
- Credited to
- Wolfgang Paul
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What it is
A device that traps charged particles (ions) using static and oscillating electric fields, without requiring a magnetic field; developed by Wolfgang Paul, with applications in mass spectrometry, atomic clocks and quantum computing.
What it led to
- High-precision mass spectrometry
- Ion-based atomic clocks, among the most precise instruments ever built
- Trapped-ion quantum computing
- Nobel Prize in Physics (1989) for Paul