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arXiv:1109.1987

Magneto-optical Trapping through a Transparent Silicon Carbide Atom Chip

Landry Huet, Mahdi Ammar, E. Morvan, Nicolas Sarazin, Jean-Paul Pocholle, Jakob Reichel, Christine Guerlin, Sylvain Schwartz

Published Sep 9, 2011• 0 citations
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Abstract

We demonstrate the possibility of trapping about one hundred million rubidium atoms in a magneto-optical trap with several of the beams passing through a transparent atom chip mounted on a vacuum cell wall. The chip is made of a gold microcircuit deposited on a silicon carbide substrate, with favorable thermal conductivity. We show how a retro-reflected configuration can efficiently address the chip birefringence issues, allowing atom trapping at arbitrary distances from the chip. We also demonstrate detection through the chip, granting a large numerical aperture. This configuration is compared to other atom chip devices, and some possible applications are discussed.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1109.1987

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We demonstrate the possibility of trapping about one hundred million rubidium atoms in a magneto-optical trap with several of the beams passing through a transparent atom chip mounted on a vacuum cell wall. The chip is made of a gold microcircuit deposited on a silicon carbide substrate, with favorable thermal conductivity. We show how a retro-reflected configuration can efficiently address the chip birefringence issues, allowing atom trapping at arbitrary distances from the chip. We also demonstrate detection through the chip, granting a large numerical aperture. This configuration is compared to other atom chip devices, and some possible applications are discussed.
We investigate some properties of an atom chip made of a gold microcircuit deposited on a transparent silicon carbide substrate. A favorable thermal behavior is observed in the presence of electrical current, twice as good as a silicon counterpart. We obtain one hundred million rubidium atoms in a magneto-optical trap with several of the beams passing through the chip. We point out the importance of coating of the chip against reflection to avoid a temperature-dependent Fabry-Perot effect. We finally discuss detection through the chip, potentially granting large numerical apertures, as well as some other potential applications.
Atom chips [1] are an efficient tool for trapping, cooling and manipulating cold atoms, which could open the way to a new generation of compact atomic sensors addressing space applications. This is in particular due to the fact that they can achieve strong magnetic field gradients near the chip surface, hence strong atomic confinement at moderate electrical power. However, this advantage usually comes at the price of reducing the optical access to the atoms, which are confined very close to the chip surface. We will report at the conference experimental investigations showing how these limits could be pushed farther by using an atom chip made of a gold microcircuit deposited on a single-crystal Silicon Carbide (SiC) substrate [2]. With a band gap energy value of about 3.2 eV at room temperature, the latter material is transparent at 780nm, potentially restoring quasi full optical access to the atoms. Moreover, it combines a very high electrical resistivity with a very high thermal conductivity, making it a good candidate for supporting wires with large currents without the need of any additional electrical insulation layer [3].
We describe experiments on the trapping of atoms in microscopic magneto-optical traps on an optically transparent permanent-magnet atom chip. The chip is made of magnetically hard ferrite-garnet material deposited on a dielectric substrate. The confining magnetic fields are produced by miniature magnetized patterns recorded in the film by magneto-optical techniques. We trap Rb atoms on these structures by applying three crossed pairs of counterpropagating laser beams in the conventional magneto-optical trapping geometry. We demonstrate the flexibility of the concept in creation and in situ modification of the trapping geometries through several experiments.