Saturday, October 21, 2006

Penning Trap

Penning traps are devices for the storage of charged particles using a constant magnetic field and a constant electric field. This kind of trap is particularly well suited for precision measurements of properties of ions and stable subatomic particles which have electric charge. Recently this trap has been used in the physical realization of quantum computation and quantum information processing as well. Currently Penning traps are used at CERN to store antiprotons. The invention of the Penning trap is attributed to Hans Georg Dehmelt who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for this work.