Over the last quarter of this century, revolutionary advances have been
made both in kind and in precision in the application of particle traps
to the study of thephysics of charged particles, leading to intensi?ed
interest in, and wide proliferation of, this topic. This book is
intended as a timely addition to the literature, providing a systematic
uni?ed treatment of the subject, from the point of view of the
application of these devices to fundamental atomic and particle physics.
Thetechniqueofusingelectromagnetic?eldstocon?neandisolateatomic
particles in vacuo, rather than by material walls of a container, was
initially
conceivedbyW.Paulintheformofa3Dversionoftheoriginalrfquadrupole mass
?lter, for which he shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in physics [1],
whereas H.G. Dehmelt who also shared the 1989 Nobel Prize [2] saw
these devices (including the Penning trap) as a way of isolating
electrons and ions, for the purposes of high resolution spectroscopy.
These two broad areas of appli- tion have developed more or less
independently, each attaining a remarkable degree of sophistication and
generating widespread interest and experimental activity.