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Europhysics Letters (EPL)

A Dynamic Electric Trap for Ground-State Atoms

Erling Riis, Stephen Mark Barnett

Published Feb 10, 1993• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A new type of trap for ground-state atoms is proposed. It is based on the balancing of gravity and the electric-dipole attraction between the polarisable atom and a slowly oscillating electric charge. The stability of this dynamic trap is predicted for a narrow range of operating conditions. However, practical considerations result in a trap depth only comparable to the lowest temperatures routinely obtained with laser-cooled atoms.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/21/5/005

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A new type of trap for ground-state atoms is proposed. It is based on the balancing of gravity and the electric-dipole attraction between the polarisable atom and a slowly oscillating electric charge. The stability of this dynamic trap is predicted for a narrow range of operating conditions. However, practical considerations result in a trap depth only comparable to the lowest temperatures routinely obtained with laser-cooled 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 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.
This review describes the methods of trapping cold atoms in electromagnetic fields and in the combined electromagnetic and gravity fields. We discuss first the basic types of the dipole radiation forces used for cooling and trapping atoms in the laser fields. We outline next the fundamentals of the laser cooling of atoms and classify the temperature limits for basic laser cooling processes. The main body of the review is devoted to discussion of atom traps based on the dipole radiation forces, dipole magnetic forces, combined dipole radiation-magnetic forces, and the forces combined of the dipole radiation-magnetic and gravity forces. Physical fundamentals of atom traps operating as waveguides and cavities for cold atoms are also considered. The review ends with the applications of cold and trapped atoms in atomic, molecular and optical physics.
In order to confine any object, it is necessary to exchange kinetic for potential energy in the trapping field, and in neutral atom traps, the potential energy must be stored as internal atomic energy. Thus practical traps for ground-state neutral atoms are necessarily very shallow compared with thermal energy because the energy level shifts that result from conveniently sized fields are typically considerably smaller than k B T , even for T = 1 K. Neutral atom trapping therefore depends on substantial cooling of a thermal atomic sample, and is often connected with the cooling process. In most practical cases, atoms are loaded from magneto-optical traps, where they have been efficiently accumulated and cooled to mK temperatures (see Sec. 20.3), or from optical molasses, where they have been optically cooled to μK temperatures (see Sec. 19.4). The small depth of typical neutral atom traps dictates stringent vacuum requirements, because an atom cannot remain trapped after a collision with a thermal energy background gas molecule. Since these atoms are vulnerable targets for thermal energy background gas, the mean free time between collisions must exceed the desired trapping time. The cross-section for destructive collisions is quite large because even a gentle collision (i.e. large impact parameter) can impart enough energy to eject an atom from a trap. At pressure P sufficiently low to be of practical interest, the trapping time is ~(10 -8 / P ) s, where P is in torr. This chapter begins with a discussion of ordinary, single-center traps, but also considers arrays of traps. Such “optical lattices” are playing an increasingly important role in research in atomic physics, so discussion of their properties is an appropriate part of the education of a student of the subject. Dipole force optical traps Single-beam optical traps for two-level atoms The simplest imaginable optical trap consists of a single, strongly focused Gaussian laser beam (see Fig. 20.1) [214, 215] whose intensity at the focus varies transversely with r as where is the beam waist size. Such a trap has a well-studied and important macroscopic classical analog in a phenomenon called optical tweezers (see App. 1.C) [216–218].
Hybrid quantum platforms based on highly excited Rydberg atoms coupled to nanophotonics devices offer a promising route toward scalable quantum networks and integrated quantum technologies. However, the close proximity of Rydberg atoms to dielectric nanostructures makes these systems particularly susceptible to uncontrolled surface electric fields that can lead to a degradation of the excitation process. Here, we experimentally investigate Rydberg excitation of laser-cooled 87^{87}87Rb atoms via the evanescent field of an optical nanofiber in the presence of fiber-guided red- and blue-detuned light fields as used to trap ground state atoms in fiber-based dipole traps. We observe a time evolution of the Rydberg excitation spectrum when both the dipole trapping fields are on and the additional spectral features that appear can be suppressed by applying an external oscillating electric field to the system, strongly indicating that surface charge accumulation is responsible for the observed spectral feature. The experimental results are reproduced qualitatively by a model that incorporates DC energy level shifts arising from electric fields generated by charges deposited on the nanofiber surface. We identify Rydberg-ground state collisional ionization, which is enhanced by the dipole trapping fields, as the dominant mechanism for charge generation. These results provide new insight into charge dynamics at dielectric nanophotonic interfaces and establish practical guidelines for mitigating surface charge-induced electric fields in fiber-integrated Rydberg quantum systems.