On the other hand, the recent miniaturization of ion traps opened up new opportunities for the precise manipulation of trapped particles capitalizing on the strong field gradients achievable in microstructured devices, for improving the scalability of traps which is of importance for, e.g., large-scale quantum information processing, for reducing the size and cost of the experimental apparatus and for the development of multi-functional chip devices. It has recently been combined with helium buffer-gas techniques to also achieve cooling of the internal molecular degrees of freedom. This method has been widely used in radiofrequency (RF) traps and is applicable to molecules ranging from diatomics to large biomolecules. An efficient method applicable to trapped molecular ions is sympathetic cooling of their translational motion through collisions with co-trapped laser-cooled atomic ions leading to the formation of bicomponent Coulomb crystals. Therefore, laser cooling and efficient fluorescence detection are limited to a small number of cases. The challenges for cooling and detecting molecules generally arise from the lack of closed optical cycles caused by their complex energy-level structures. The exquisite control of the internal and external degrees of freedom of the molecules which can be achieved to date paves the way for new applications in quantum computation, precision spectroscopy, quantum optics, mass spectrometry, collision studies and cold chemistry. The technology for preparing and controlling cold molecules and molecular ions has made impressive progress over the past years. We discuss in more detail the separation of different ion species using static electric fields and explore the effects of trap anharmoncities on the shape of bicomponent crystals. Here, we present a detailed description of the fabrication and simulation of the trap as well as a theoretical and experimental investigation of the structural and energetic properties of the Coulomb crystals obtained in the device. The flexibility in shaping the trapping potentials offered by the surface-electrode structure enabled us to generate planar bicomponent Coulomb crystals and spatially separate the molecular from the atomic ions. Recently, we implemented this method in a surface-electrode ion trap. In this context, sympathetic cooling of molecular ions by the interaction with laser-cooled atomic ions is a powerful method to cool their translational motion and achieve translational temperatures in the millikelvin range. Cold molecular ions are of great interest for applications in cold collision studies, chemistry, precision spectroscopy and quantum technologies.
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