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Europhysics Letters (EPL)

An Opto-electric Trap for Cold Atoms

P. Lemonde, O. Morice, E. Peik, Jakob Reichel, Hélène Perrin, W. Hänsel, Ch Salomon

Published Dec 1, 1995• 20 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present a new type of conservative trap for cold atoms: a static electric field creates a position-dependent Stark potential to compensate gravity and a far-off-resonance laser beam provides transverse confinement. We demonstrate this Opto-Electric Trap (OET) on cesium atoms, using a ring electrode at 12 kV and a Ti-sapphire laser. Loaded from a magneto-optical trap, up to 2.5 · 10 5 atoms are captured in the OET. The 1/ e lifetime is ∼1 s, presently limited by collisions with the background gas. This trap is well suited for subrecoil laser cooling and evaporative cooling of confined atoms.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/32/7/003

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•Mar 1, 2003•1 citation
We present a new type of conservative trap for cold atoms: a static electric field creates a position-dependent Stark potential to compensate gravity and a far-off-resonance laser beam provides transverse confinement. We demonstrate this Opto-Electric Trap (OET) on cesium atoms, using a ring electrode at 12 kV and a Ti-sapphire laser. Loaded from a magneto-optical trap, up to 2.5 · 10 5 atoms are captured in the OET. The 1/ e lifetime is ∼1 s, presently limited by collisions with the background gas. This trap is well suited for subrecoil laser cooling and evaporative cooling of confined atoms.
Laser cooled and trapped atoms have been the workhorse of atomic physics for the past four decades. The predominant method has been the highly versatile Magneto-Optical Trap. We describe an alternative laser trap involving a simple geometry of collimated laser beams that provides both a velocity and position dependent restoring force such that a dense cloud of cold atoms is formed. This technique produces similar atom number (>106>10^6>106) and density (101010^{10}1010\,atoms/cm3^{3}3) to the Magneto-Optical Trap, albeit with \emph{no magnetic field}. The beam geometry is compatible with conventional sub-Doppler cooling techniques, allowing the trapped cloud to be cooled to <10 μ< 10~μ<10 μK. We demonstrate the validity and robustness of the trap by capturing 87^{87}87Rb atoms directly from the background vapor and provide a theoretical discussion of the underlying principles. This trap has many unique properties that make it highly suitable for quantum sensing, timing, and computing applications as well as a new tool in fundamental science and metrology.
We report preliminary results on the deflection of a beam of ultra-cold atoms by a static magnetic field. Caesium atoms trapped in a magneto-optical trap (MOT) are cooled using optical molasses, and then fall freely under gravity to form a beam of ultra-cold atoms. The atoms pass through a static inhomogeneous magnetic field produced by a single current-carrying wire, and are deflected by a force ?(µB) dependent on the magnetic substate of the atom. The population of atoms in various magnetic substates can be altered by using resonant laser radiation to optically pump the atoms.
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 report on the observation of a new laser trap for neutral atoms. It uses three orthogonal pairs of counterpropagating laser beams having linear polarizations at 45° and a quadrupole magnetic field. 10 8 cesium atoms were thus confined in a 0.15 mm 3 volume at a temperature of 60 μK, a factor of 2 below the Doppler cooling limit. We interpret this trapping as being due to the new magneto-optical force recently observed by Grimm et al. and which is essentially a dipole force rectified by the magnetic field. This trap opens new possibilities for increasing the phase-space density of laser-cooled atoms.
We propose an optically accessible electrostatic trap scheme to confine cold polar molecules by using two charged spherical electrodes, and we calculate the corresponding electric field distribution and the Stark trapping potential for ND3 molecules. We also propose a desirable scheme to realize an efficient loading of cold polar molecules in weak-field-seeking states, and our simulated results show that the maximal loading efficiency can reach ∼14%. In addition, we briefly discuss some potential applications of our proposed trap scheme in the studies of optical-potential evaporative cooling and electrostatic surface traps for cold polar molecules.
The aim of this research is to pave the way for making a trap for cold neutral atoms based on the force generated by pulses of a mode-locked laser. As an onset towards such a trap we decided to use a far-off-resonance trap (FORT) loaded with cold rubidium atoms from a magneto-optical trap (MOT). Our FORT setup consists of a titanium-sapphire laser that can operate both in continuous wave mode and in mode-locked mode. Our MOT setup uses a magnetic field gradient, and two diode lasers whose frequency is locked very accurately to the atomic transition using polarisation spectroscopy. Since the measurements we do require very precise timing of the order of less than one millisecond between the various phases of the experiment, a time-sequencing program was developed. Using this sophisticated setup, several characteristics of FORTs made with continuous and pulsed lasers were analysed. For example, we have investigated the loading behaviour of the traps and found that under general circumstances there is no significant difference. However, under special conditions it is possible to load more atoms into a pulsed trap. The lifetime of the number of atoms in the trap shows no dependence on the power of the trap laser in the continuous case. For the pulsed trap, however, the increased scattering due to the high peak intensities of the pulses does limit the achievable lifetimes. Moreover, due to the presence of a large number of photoassociation lines, i.e. lines were loosely bound molecules are formed by the interaction of two atoms an a photon, the two-particle losses depend heavily on the wavelength of the trap laser. Furthermore we have done measurements of the temperature of the trapped atoms, which revealed that the temperature is a constant fraction of the trap depth. We also looked at the effects of parametric excitation of the atoms in the FORT. The anharmonicity of the trap formed by the titanium-sapphire laser results in interesting physics, including a change in the average temperature of the atoms, depending on the modulation frequency. We also investigated the trapping behaviour of the FORT at low pulse repetition rates by switching the laser intensity on and off on a kHz scale. We investigated the dependence of the number of atoms on the polarisation of the FORT laser light, both for continuous and pulsed traps. Atoms can be trapped at elliptical polarisations as well, although the number of trapped atoms is less. As the laser is detuned further to the red of the rubidium D line, this effect becomes less and less pronounced, as predicted by our model.