The mystery of the heating ions, or: why should you care about fluctuations in AC currents?

When the lasers that cool trapped ions are switched off, the ions heat up about three orders of magnitude faster than theoretically expected. This anomalous heating is known for more than 20 years, and has been measured in more than hundred of setups around the world. It is currently the bottleneck for both the number of quantum gates that can be applied on trapped ions qubits and limits the accuracy of ion clocks. In my talk I will try to convince that AC current fluctuations, which are similar to the DC fluctuations we commonly study in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, play a crucial role in the trapped ions heating problem.