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Japanese Journal of Applied Physics

High Spatial Resolution Atom Detector with Two-Color Optical Near Fields

Kouki Totsuka, Haruhiko Ito, Tomoto Kawamura, Motoichi Ohtsu

Published Mar 15, 2002• 19 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We describe a slit-type detector for ground-state atoms with nanometer optical near fields. The detector with a slit width of 70 nm and a slit length of 100 µm is fabricated by processing a silicon-on-insulator wafer with photolithography and anisotropic etching. Measurement with a fiber probe of the intensity distribution on the slit reveals that the spatial resolution is 96 nm. Rubidium atoms can be selectively detected by means of two-step photoionization. The detection efficiency is estimated at 25% for Rb atoms with a mean velocity of 10 m/s. The atom detector can be used for atom deflection experiments with a fiber probe.

DOI
10.1143/jjap.41.1566

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We describe a slit-type detector for ground-state atoms with nanometer optical near fields. The detector with a slit width of 70 nm and a slit length of 100 µm is fabricated by processing a silicon-on-insulator wafer with photolithography and anisotropic etching. Measurement with a fiber probe of the intensity distribution on the slit reveals that the spatial resolution is 96 nm. Rubidium atoms can be selectively detected by means of two-step photoionization. The detection efficiency is estimated at 25% for Rb atoms with a mean velocity of 10 m/s. The atom detector can be used for atom deflection experiments with a fiber probe.
Summary form only given. We have proposed deflection by an optical near field on a fiber probe to control atoms with high spatial accuracy. In this case, the deflection angle is estimated to be 0.1 degree for a Rb atom with an incident velocity of 10 m/s. It leads to the deviation of 10 /spl mu/m from the incident axis at 1 cm. in the downstream. To detect the deflected atoms with an accuracy of 1%, we need the spatial resolution of 100 nm. However, a commercial detector such as MCP has a low resolution of 50 /spl mu/m at most and the highest resolution that has been reported is 1 /spl mu/m to our knowledge. In addition, these are applied to metastable atoms and have less detection efficiency for the ground state atoms we manipulate. For drastic improvement, we present here a slit-type atom detector with a nanometric lateral resolution. Since the number of atoms deflected by the optical near field is very small, it is important to detect atoms with high efficiency. For this purpose, we use photoionization with two-color optical near fields.
We develop a nanoslit to detect a small number of neutral atoms in the ground state. The detection scheme of using two-step photoionization is very sensitive and the use of nanometric near-field lights leads to an ultrahigh spatial resolution. An edge-sharpened nanoslit is fabricated with FIB milling. Considering the case of detecting Rb atoms, the polarization-dependent spatial distribution of near-field light generated at the nanoslit by total-internal reflection of a 476.5-nm Ar-ion laser beam is obtained with a scanning near-field optical microscope. Based on the experimental results, the ionization efficiency is estimated for both s-polarization and p-polarization. We also discuss the discrepancy between the experimental value and the numerical one obtained from the finite difference time domain simulations in the p-polarization case.
We fabricated a 50-nm-wide slit on a glass substrate using the lift-off process with a bilayer resist including Cr. The nanometric slit is designed for detecting a small number of neutral atoms in the ground state with high spatial accuracy by way of two-step photoionization with two-color near-field lights. Conducting the finite difference time domain simulations, we drew the spatial profiles of near-field lights generated in the vicinity of the slit for both cases of normal illumination and total-internal reflection (TIR) illumination with a linearly polarized light beam. In the slit-parallel-incident TIR configuration with s-polarization, we obtained a good throughput of 1.1 x 10-2 and the highest extinction ratio of 2.2 x 10-7 for a wavelength of 780 nm. In this case, the ionization efficiency of low-energy 87Rb atoms in the 5S1/2 hyperfine state is estimated to exceed 1%.