Towards Fast Cooling with High Secular Frequency Ion Traps

Laser cooling is a foundational technique in trapped-ion experiments and underpins a wide range of applications from precision measurement to quantum information science. However, cooling typically dominates experimental duty cycles, and as protocols grow in complexity, long cooling times increasingly limit achievable repetition rates, probe times, and quantum circuit runtimes. Here we propose the development of a high secular frequency ion trap designed to access high frequency motional modes that are spectrally resolved on fast cycling optical transitions. This platform will enable systematic investigations of laser cooling in the resolved Doppler regime which achieves enhanced cooling rates and lower steady-state motional occupations compared to the more typical experimental regime of unresolved Doppler cooling. For high frequency motional modes, faster cooling, reduced cooling limits, and lower initial motional excitation per experimental shot combine to substantially shorten overall cooling times. The proposed system establishes a path toward next-generation trapped-ion experiments with significantly increased speed and faster duty cycles for more scalable quantum information processing and time-sensitive trapped-ion protocols.