Physical Review A
Mirror magneto-optical trap exploiting hexapole-compensated magnetic field
Masaharu Hyodo, Kazuyuki Nakayama, Masayoshi Watanabe, R. Ohmukai
Abstract
A mirror magneto-optical trap (MOT) that exploits a hexapole-compensated magnetic field was developed and used in the experimental surface trapping of neutral atoms. A pair of subsidiary wires, which was placed near the main current-carrying wire, was designed to improve the uniformity of the quadrupole magnetic field and thus increased the effective capture volume of our mirror-MOT. In the experiment, the number of $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms captured with our mirror-MOT was approximately twice that captured with a conventional mirror-MOT.