Simple model of electrostatic trap

th5418

Hey guys,
I need some help on my research assignment which was dumped upon me during finals week. Thank you research leader for unloading your anger upon this poor undergrad. Anyways, I'm in a project to construct an electrostatic trap... and to model it in matlab. I figure I should try to do this on paper, but I just realized that I have no idea really how one should model this. I figure it's like a box of potentials so would I just solve some LaPlace's equation and gungho on that for a simplistic model?

Does anybody have any further information about electrostatic traps? When I googled it and hit the first few links, it's a bit mumbojumbo, I hope it'll clear up when finals are over, but I'm pretty stressing out right now.

Thanks for the help.

Oh, an electrostatic ion trap by the way.

berkeman

Could you say more about what you mean by "electrostatic ion trap"? Do you mean like an Orbitrap? Or a bug zapper, or what? Is the thing to be trapped already ionized, or does your field have to do the ionization too?