Electric field noise is a major contributor to the motional heating of trapped ions, resulting in frequency shifts and significant frequency uncertainties in precision spectroscopy, as well as decoherence in quantum simulation. This  becomes even more relevant when extending the systems to 2D or 3D crystals, where the ions are exposed to the high radio frequency (rf) electric field.

We measured the heating effects of trapped ions in the electric environment of our trap under different operation conditions. We especially focussed on the heating of extended crystals, where excess micromotion is unavoidable and rf noise couples to the motion of the ion. We showed that a high quality factor of the resonant rf circuit is important to reduce motional heating under these circumstances. By theoretically extrapolating our measurement result of linear chains to 2D and 3D systems, we show that the influence of rf noise on the motional modes is highly dependent on the symmetry of the crystal and of the mode structure. 

The publication can be found here.