Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Theoretical analysis of atom focusing for nanostructure fabrication
Xian Z. Chen, Ting W. Xing, Guo B. Yu, Xu N. Chen, Han M. Yao
Abstract
The two-level atom focusing in a Gaussian standing wave laser field was analyzed from the perspective of both classical mechanics and wave mechanics. The effects of source imperfection such as velocity spread and beam spread on atom focusing were analyzed by numerically integrating the classical equation of atomic motion. The ideal focal plane can be easily determined by the variation of atomic density at the minimal potential of the standing wave laser field as a function of traveling distance. In the absence of source imperfection, the contribution of diffractive aberration originating from the wave nature of the atom to broadening of feature width is larger than that of spherical aberration. Several methods for improving atom lithography experiments were presented.