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Adiabatic cooling of a single trapped ion

We present experimental results on adiabatic cooling of a single 40Ca+ ion in a linear radiofrequency trap. After a period of laser cooling, the secular frequency along the rf-field-free axis is adiabatically lowered by nearly a factor of eight from 583 kHz to 75 kHz. For an ion originally Doppler laser cooled to a temperature of 0.65 +/- 0.03 mK, a temperature of 87 +/- 7 μK is measured after the adiabatic expansion. Applying the same adiabatic cooling procedure to a single sideband cooled ion in the ground state (P0 = 0.978 +/- 0.002) resulted in a final ground state occupation of 0.947 +/- 0.005. Both results are in excellent agreement with an essentially fully adiabatic behavior. The results have a wide range of perspectives within such diverse fields as ion based quantum information science, high resolution molecular ion spectroscopy and ion chemistry at ultra-low temperatures.