Lecture Notes in Physics

Storageandcoolingtechniquesforchargedparticlesgainmoreandmoreimportance in various areas of modern science. They developed into a universal tool especially when used for precision measurements. For this purpose, there are mainly two types ofiontrapsinuse:radiofrequency quadrupole (Paul)trapswhichuseatime-varying quadrupolar electric ?eld applied to the electrodes for con?nement and Penning traps where a superposition of a homogeneous magnetic ?eld with a weak el- trostatic quadrupolar ?eld is used. Already the very ?rst experiments in ion traps, performed by their inventors Wolfgang Paul and Hans Dehmelt, paved the way for astonishingly precise measurements of fundamental quantities like the electron and positron g-factors and the ?ne-structure constant ?. Their work was honored with the Nobel Prize in physics for "the development of the ion trap technique" in 1989. Sincethenmanyexperimental physicistsworldwidehavebeenusinganddeveloping different kinds of ion traps. Today, ion traps are applied widely for instance in mass spectrometry, metrology, plasma physics, molecular and cluster physics, quantum computing, atomic and nuclear physics as well as in chemistry. Precise investigations are able to link measurable quantities to fundamental - pects of physics. Due to the achievable precision, ion traps have been used for this subjectandattractedaconferenceseries"TrappedChargedParticlesandFundam- tal Interactions." Along the main idea of that conference we organized a Heraeus Winter School that took place in Hirschegg, Austria, in spring 2006. Inspired by the success and the interest from the students we planned a book that should contain the key components of the school: interesting, introductory and up-to-date lectures connected with ion traps.