Long lifetimes and effective isolation of ions in optical and electrostatic traps

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 level(1). 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 ultra-cold interactions of ions and atoms at previously inaccessible collision energies(4-6) and may permit a novel class of experimental quantum simulations with ions and atoms in a variety of versatile optical trapping geometries(7), for example, bichromatic traps or higher-dimensional optical lattices(8,9).