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Optics Express

Deep optical trap for cold alkaline-Earth atoms

Luciano Soares da Cruz, Milena Sereno, Flávio C. Cruz

Published Jan 1, 2008• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We describe a setup for a deep optical dipole trap or lattice designed for holding atoms at temperatures of a few mK, such as alkaline-Earth atoms which have undergone only regular Doppler cooling. We use an external optical cavity to amplify 3.2 W from a commercial single-frequency laser at 532 nm to 523 W. Powers of a few kW, attainable with low-loss optics or higher input powers, allow larger trap volumes for improved atom transfer from magneto-optical traps. We analyze possibilities for cooling inside the deep trap, the induced Stark shifts for calcium, and a cancellation scheme for the intercombination clock transition using an auxiliary laser.

DOI
10.1364/oe.16.002909

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We describe a setup for a deep optical dipole trap or lattice designed for holding atoms at temperatures of a few mK, such as alkaline-Earth atoms which have undergone only regular Doppler cooling. We use an external optical cavity to amplify 3.2 W from a commercial single-frequency laser at 532 nm to 523 W. Powers of a few kW, attainable with low-loss optics or higher input powers, allow larger trap volumes for improved atom transfer from magneto-optical traps. We analyze possibilities for cooling inside the deep trap, the induced Stark shifts for calcium, and a cancellation scheme for the intercombination clock transition using an auxiliary laser.
We consider laser cooling and trapping of alkaline-earth and similar atoms in a bichromatic field resonant to a closed optical transition 1S0→1P1 or 1S0→3P1. It is shown that new kinetic effects emerge compared to monochromatic fields, enabling the formation of a deep macroscopic trap capable of capturing and cooling neutral atoms to sub-Doppler temperatures. Such a purely optical macroscopic trap can serve as an alternative to the well-known magneto-optical trap and can be used in applications requiring minimization of the magnetic field in the cold atom cloud region. The obtained results are of interest for the new generation of quantum sensors and optical frequency standards.
We consider a laser cooling and trapping of alkaline-earth and similar atoms in a bichromatic field resonant to a closed optical transition 1S0→ 1P1^1S_0 \to \, ^1P_11S0​→1P1​ or 1S0→ 3P1^1S_0 \to \, ^3P_11S0​→3P1​. It is shown that new kinetic effects emerge compared to monochromatic fields, enabling the formation of a deep macroscopic trap capable of capturing and cooling neutral atoms to sub-Doppler temperatures. Such a purely optical macroscopic trap can serve as an alternative to the well-known magneto-optical trap and can be used in applications requiring minimization of the magnetic field in the cold atom cloud region. The obtained results are of interest for the new generation of quantum sensors and optical frequency standards.
This paper reports results of cooling and trapping of88Sr for future use in an optical lattice clock. Strontium atoms are cooled to ultra-cold temperatures using a two-stage cooling process. In the first stage, atoms are captured from a Zeeman-slowed atomic beam and cooled to 2 mK in a magneto optical trap operated on the1So-1P1transition at 461 nm. The second cooling stage utilizes the spin forbidden1So-3P1transition at 689 nm. To reach ultra-cold temperatures, 50 ms of broadband cooling is followed by 28 ms long single frequency cooling. The transfer efficiency from the first to the second cooling stage was measured to be 23%, leaving 7 x 106 atoms at a temperature of 1 muK. The atomic cloud is overlapped with a horizontally oriented 1-D far-off resonance optical dipole trap (FORT) at 813 nm with an effective potential depth of 25 muK. Due to equal light shifts of the1Soand the3P1state simultaneous Doppler cooling during the atom loading into the FORT is possible which leads to a transfer efficiency into the dipole trap of up to 60%.
We propose a laser-driven Sisyphus-cooling scheme for atoms confined in a far-off resonance optical dipole trap. Utilizing the differential trap-induced ac Stark shift, two electronic levels of the atom are resonantly coupled by a cooling laser preferentially near the trap bottom. After absorption of a cooling photon, the atom loses energy by climbing the steeper potential, and then spontaneously decays preferentially away from the trap bottom. The proposed method is particularly suited to cooling alkaline-earth-metal-like atoms where two-level systems with narrow electronic transitions are present. Numerical simulations for the cases of 88{}^{88}88Sr and 174{}^{174}174Yb demonstrate the expected recoil and Doppler temperature limits. The method requires a relatively small number of scattered photons and can potentially lead to phase-space densities approaching quantum degeneracy in subsecond time scales.
Abstract The realization of compact high-power narrow-linewidth laser sources in the visible range has been a long-standing interest for the atomic physics community, especially in the field of laser cooling and trapping of alkaline-earth and alkaline-earth-like atoms. We report a simple master-slave injection-locked laser system capable of generating 500 mW at 460.86 nm with a linewidth of 1.6 MHz to realize magneto-optical trapping of strontium atoms on the 5s2 1S0−5s5p 1P15s^{2} \ ^{1}\mathrm {S}_{0}-5s5p \ ^{1}\mathrm {P}_{1}5s2 1S0​−5s5p 1P1​ 5 s 2 1 S 0 - 5 s 5 p 1 P 1 transition. The master laser used is an external cavity diode laser built with an anti-reflection coated laser diode in a Littrow configuration and the slave laser is built with a recently launched single mode high power GaN laser diode. We characterized the frequency noise, injection stability, spectral purity and relative intensity noise of the laser system. The reported laser system is used routinely to produce 10710^7107 10 7 strontium atoms at a temperature of 10 mK in a magneto-optical trap. The laser system offers a prominent alternative to the existing frequency-doubled laser systems in terms of cost, design flexibility, electrical power consumption, ease of scaling, intensity stability, and frequency tunability. The proposed system is also an effective solution for space-based experiments where a laser system’s size, weight, and electrical power consumption are crucial design parameters.