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arXiv:0812.2701 · Physical Review Letters

Electro-Optical Nanotraps for Neutral Atoms

Brian M. Murphy, Lene Vestergaard Hau

Published Jan 22, 2009• 41 citations
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Abstract

We propose a new class of nanoscale electro-optical traps for neutral atoms. A prototype is the toroidal trap created by a suspended, charged carbon nanotube decorated with a silver nanosphere dimer. An illuminating laser field, blue detuned from an atomic resonance frequency, is strongly focused by plasmons induced in the dimer and generates both a repulsive potential barrier near the nanostructure surface and a large viscous damping force that facilitates trap loading. Atoms with velocities of several meters per second may be loaded directly into the trap via spontaneous emission of just two photons.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.102.033003

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We propose a new class of nanoscale electro-optical traps for neutral atoms. A prototype is the toroidal trap created by a suspended, charged carbon nanotube decorated with a silver nanosphere dimer. An illuminating laser field, blue detuned from an atomic resonance frequency, is strongly focused by plasmons induced in the dimer and generates both a repulsive potential barrier near the nanostructure surface and a large viscous damping force that facilitates trap loading. Atoms with velocities of several meters per second may be loaded directly into the trap via spontaneous emission of just two photons.
We theoretically propose blue-detuned optical trapping for neutral atoms via strong near-field interfacing in a plasmonic nanohole array. The optical field at resonance forms a nanoscale-trap potential with an FWHM of 200 nm and about ∼370  nm away from the nanohole; thus, a stable 3D atom trapping independent of the surface potential is demonstrated. The effective trap depth is more than 1 mK when the optical power of trapping light is only about 0.5 mW, while the atom scattering rate is merely about 3.31  s−1, and the trap lifetime is about 800 s. This compact plasmonic structure provides high uniformity of trap depths and a two-layer array of atom nanotraps, which should have important applications in the manipulation of cold atoms and collective resonance fluorescence.
We propose and analyze a scheme to interface individual neutral atoms with nanoscale solid-state systems. The interface is enabled by optically trapping the atom via the strong near-field generated by a sharp metallic nanotip. We show that under realistic conditions, a neutral atom can be trapped with position uncertainties of just a few nanometers, and within tens of nanometers of other surfaces. Simultaneously, the guided surface plasmon modes of the nanotip allow the atom to be optically manipulated, or for fluorescence photons to be collected, with very high efficiency. Finally, we analyze the surface forces, heating and decoherence rates acting on the trapped atom.
We discuss our recent experimental demonstrations of three novel atom traps which are all based on the optical dipole force in far-detuned laser light. In the gravito-optical surface trap (GOST), Cs atoms are trapped and cooled by means of an evanescent-wave mirror very closely above a dielectric surface. This trap allows for optical cooling at very high densities and provides good starting conditions for evaporative cooling to quantum degeneracy and the realization of a 2D quantum gas. The conical atom trap (CAT) uses a hollow blue-detuned laser beam in combination with gravity to trap atoms in a dark spatial region. This trap is experimentally simple and provides high loading efficiency, tight confinement, efficient sub-Doppler cooling, and strong suppression of collisional losses. The standing-wave red-detuned (STAR) trap allows one to confine atoms in a shallow optical potential at a very low photon scattering rate, and is thus an interesting tool for studies of the atomic ground-state dynamics in external electro-magnetic fields. We have studied atomic spin polarization in this trap.
We propose a novel setup for optically trapping neutral atoms based upon the focusing properties of metamaterials. The optical trap is created at the focal point of an inverted-opal crystal when the latter is illuminated by a localized light source. The trap is located away from the surface of the inverted-opal lens, rendering the Casimir-Polder attraction exerted by the lens on the atom negligible. The key properties of the proposed optical trap are its subwavelength dimensions, the tunability of the trapping frequency, the facile translation of the trap without moving the lens, and the potential for creating an array of traps. We also study the ground state of a cesium Bose-Einstein condensate formed within the proposed trap by solving the corresponding time-independent Gross-Pitaevskii equation.
Ultracold atom-traps on a chip enhances the practical application of atom traps in quantum information processing, sensing, and metrology. Plasmon mediated near-field optical potentials are promising for trapping atoms. The combination of plasmonic nanostructures and ultracold atoms has the potential to create a two dimensional array of neutral atoms with lattice spacing smaller than that of lattices created from interfering light fields -- the optical lattices. We report the design, fabrication and characterization of a nano-scale array of near-field optical traps for neutral atoms using plasmonic nanostructures. The building block of the array is a metallic nano-disc fabricated on the surface of an ITO-coated glass substrate. We numerically simulate the electromagnetic field-distribution using Finite Difference Time Domain method around the nanodisc, and calculate the intensity, optical potential and the dipole force for 87^{87}87Rb atoms. The optical near-field generated from the fabricated nanostructures is experimentally characterized by using Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy. We find that the optical potential and dipole force has all the desired characteristics to trap cold atoms when a blue-detuned light-field is used to excite the nanostructures. This trap can be used for effective trapping and manipulation of isolated atoms and also for creating a lattice of neutral atoms having sub-optical wavelength lattice spacing. Near-field measurements are affected by the influence of tip on the sub-wavelength structure. We present a deconvolution method to extract the actual near-field profile from the measured data.