Long trapping times, as well as low heating and decoherence rates, essentially isolating individual particles from the environment, are crucial ingredients for controlling these particles on the quantum level¹. Here, we demonstrate that optical trapping and isolation of ions can be performed on a level comparable to neutral atoms, boosting their lifetime by three orders of magnitude compared to previous work^2,3, and measure an upper bound of the total heating rate. The achieved isolation from the environment opens a path to a novel regime of ultracold interactions of ions and atoms at previously inaccessible collision energies^4,5,6 and may permit a novel class of experimental quantum simulations with ions and atoms in a variety of versatile optical trapping geometries⁷, for example, bichromatic traps or higher-dimensional optical lattices^8,9.

捕获时间长，以及低的加热和退相干率，基本上将单个粒子与环境隔离，是在量子水平¹上控制这些粒子的关键因素。在这里，我们证明了离子的光俘获和隔离可以在与中性原子相当的水平上进行，与以前的工作^2,3相比，它们的寿命提高了三个数量级，并测量了总加热速率的上限。与环境的隔离开辟了通往离子和原子在以前无法获得的碰撞能量^4,5,6的超冷相互作用新机制的途径并可能允许在各种通用的光学陷阱几何学^7中使用离子和原子进行新型的实验量子模拟，例如双色陷阱或高维光学格子^8,9。