Barium magnesium alloy as source of atomic Ba for ion trapping

Trapped atomic ion qubits exhibit long coherence times and high fidelity in qubit state preparation, manipulation, and detection, making them well-suited for scalable quantum computing applications. Among several atomic species used in quantum computing and other applications, singly charged ions of barium stand out due to their long wavelength transitions and the presence of very long-lived metastable internal states. However, elemental barium is a highly reactive metal, making it experimentally difficult to work with when making atomic beam sources. In this paper, we demonstrate a method of using resistively heated ovens loaded with a barium magnesium alloy (BaMg) as a source of barium for ion traps. This alloy is not very chemically reactive and does not oxidize in air. We found that a sample of BaMg in a resistively heated oven produced barium vapor pressures on the same order as a metallic barium sample prepared the same way. Two separate ovens, one with a sample of BaMg and one with metallic barium, were used as sources for an ion trap. We observed reliable trapping of 138Ba+ ions both with the elemental barium source and the BaMg source.