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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Experimental Investigation of Transparent Silicon Carbide as a Promising Material for Atom Chips

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

Published Jan 1, 2012• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We experimentally investigate the possibility of exploiting optical transparency and favorable thermal behavior of silicon carbide for atom chips, and discuss potential applications including high numerical aperture detection through the chip.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_at.2012.jth2a.40

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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].
Atomic cells made by anodically bonding silicon and borosilicate glasses are widely used in atomic devices. One inherent problem in these cells is that the silicon material blocks beams with wavelengths shorter than 1000 nm, which limits available optical accesses when alkali metal atoms are involved. In this work, we investigate the possibility of the silicon carbide material as an alternative of silicon materials in fabricating anodically bonded cells. We demonstrate that the optical, thermal and mechanical properties of silicon carbide help to improve the performance of atomic devices in certain applications.
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.