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Acta Physica Polonica A

Flexible Optical Dipole Mirror for Cold Atoms

Tomasz Kawalec, Krzysztof Kiersnowski, Jacek Fiutowski, T. Dohnalik

Published Oct 1, 2008• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A flexible and relatively simple and cheap optical dipole mirror for cold rubidium atoms from magneto-optical trap is described, being a very modern and efficient tool for atomic physicists.Emphasis is put on physical processes responsible for the mirror parameters and their optimization.Promising perspectives are provided for evanescent wave properties investigation and atom-surface interaction measurements.

DOI
10.12693/aphyspola.114.721

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A flexible and relatively simple and cheap optical dipole mirror for cold rubidium atoms from magneto-optical trap is described, being a very modern and efficient tool for atomic physicists.Emphasis is put on physical processes responsible for the mirror parameters and their optimization.Promising perspectives are provided for evanescent wave properties investigation and atom-surface interaction measurements.
We have demonstrated that a suitably magnetized surface can be used to retroreflect cold atoms for applications in atom optics. This has some advantages relative to evanescent wave mirrors because no light is involved. Multiple bounces of cold rubidium atoms have been observed for times up to 1 s in a trap formed by gravity and a 2 cm diameter spherical mirror made from a flexible computer disk (`floppy disk'). We have studied the dynamics of the atoms bouncing in this trap from several different heights up to 40.5 mm and we conclude that the atoms are reflected specularly and with reflectivity 1.01(3). The performance of this mirror is limited at present by collisions with the background gas and by unwanted harmonics in the magnetization of the surface. This is the first in a series of papers concerning the use of magnetized surfaces in atom optics.
The control and manipulation of the atomic translational and internal degrees of freedom via atom-laser interaction is an essential tool in modern quantum optical experiments which allows for a large variety of applications. The present work is concerned with theoretical investigations which may shed some light on certain experiments in this field.In the first part of this work, cooperative effects in the fluorescence of dipole-dipole interacting atoms in a trap are studied. The famous macroscopic quantum jumps can occur for a single atom with a metastable state when illuminated by light. Then periods of fluorescence of fixed intensity alternate stochastically with dark periods. If one has two or three such atoms in a trap, there are dark periods and periods of single and multiple intensity, from overlap. The statistics of these periods is influenced by the dipole-dipole interaction between the atoms in a sensitive manner. This work is concerned with a theoretical description of these effects, including a discussion of the seemingly contradictory experimental results which have been obtained in this context. The main result indicates that the huge rate of double and triple jumps reported for three trapped Ba+ ions can in fact not be attributed to the dipole-dipole interaction.In the second part, the possible use of an evanescent wave atomic mirror as a measuring device for the properties of an atomic wave packet is investigated. The idea is taken from an experiment, in which such a mirror was used for the temporal diffraction of a cloud of laser cooled atoms dropping out of a magneto-optical trap. A model for the investigation of the atomic wave function with such a mirror is given, and the outcomes of different set-ups are investigated. The main result shows that with such a mirror one can sample the mod-squared of a spread-out wave function, and this opens the way for a realistic possibility for measuring this otherwise not easily accessible quantity.
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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.