A complicated Duffing oscillator in the surface-electrode ion trap

The oscillation coupling and different nonlinear effects are observed in a single trapped ⁴⁰Ca⁺ ion confined in our home-built surface-electrode trap (SET). The coupling and the nonlinearity are originated from the high-order multipole potentials, such as hexapole and octopole potentials, due to different layouts and the fabrication asymmetry of the SET. We solve a complicated Duffing equation with coupled oscillation terms by the multiple-scale method, which fits the experimental values very well. Our investigation in the SET helps for exploring multi-dimensional nonlinearity using currently available techniques and for suppressing instability of qubits in quantum information processing with trapped ions.