Efficient isotope-selective pulsed laser ablation loading of ¹⁷⁴Yb⁺ ions in a surface electrode trap.

We report a highly efficient loading of 174Yb+ ions in a surface electrode ion trap by using single pulses from a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser to ablate neutral atoms, combined with a two-photon photo-ionization process. The method is three orders of magnitude faster to load a single ion as compared to traditional resistively heated sources and can load large collections of ions in seconds. The negligible thermal load of this method enables the use of this ablation-based loading scheme in ion traps operating under cryogenic conditions.