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Chinese Physics B

Nanoscale guiding for cold atoms based on surface plasmons along the tips of metallic wedges

Zhengling Wang, Weimin Tang, Ming Zhou, Chuan-Yu Gao

Published Jul 1, 2013• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We propose a novel scheme to guide neutral cold atoms in a nanoscale region based on surface plasmons (SPs) of one pair and two pairs of tips of metallic wedges with locally enhanced light intensity and sub-optical wavelength resolution. We analyze the near-field intensity distribution of the tip of the metallic wedge by the FDTD method, and study the total intensity as well as the total potential of optical potentials and van der Waals potentials for 87Rb atoms in the light field of one pair and two pairs of tips of metallic wedges. It shows that the total potentials of one pair and two pairs of tips of metallic wedges can generate a gravito-optical trap and a dark closed trap for nanoscale guiding of neutral cold atoms. Guided atoms can be cooled with efficient intensity-gradient Sisyphus cooling by blue-detuned light field. This provides an important step towards the generation of hybrid systems consisting of isolated atoms and solid devices.

DOI
10.1088/1674-1056/22/7/073701

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We propose a novel scheme to guide neutral cold atoms in a nanoscale region based on surface plasmons (SPs) of one pair and two pairs of tips of metallic wedges with locally enhanced light intensity and sub-optical wavelength resolution. We analyze the near-field intensity distribution of the tip of the metallic wedge by the FDTD method, and study the total intensity as well as the total potential of optical potentials and van der Waals potentials for 87Rb atoms in the light field of one pair and two pairs of tips of metallic wedges. It shows that the total potentials of one pair and two pairs of tips of metallic wedges can generate a gravito-optical trap and a dark closed trap for nanoscale guiding of neutral cold atoms. Guided atoms can be cooled with efficient intensity-gradient Sisyphus cooling by blue-detuned light field. This provides an important step towards the generation of hybrid systems consisting of isolated atoms and solid devices.
We propose a novel scheme to generate nanoscale optical trap for cold atoms near the tapered Ag nanotip, in which we take a microdisk cavity near the nanoscale trap and form a nanoscale solid-state system to realize the loading of the isolated cold atoms. We calculate the field distribution by the FDTD method near the nanotip, and discuss the intensity, the optical potential and van der Waals potential as well as the dipole force for 87Rb atoms. We find that the total potential and dipole force can form an attracting nanoscale trap for cold atoms with red-detuned field and it can realize the effective trapping and manipulation of the isolated atoms, which can enable efficient fluorescence photon collection and strong coupling in the coupled optical fiber.
We propose a scheme to generate one-dimensional (1D) dark hollow lattices to trap and guide cold atoms periodically at the nanometer scale by surface plasmons (SP) excited on the periodic metallic strips (arrays) with the blue-detuned light.Intensity and optical potential in the trap are calculated by Comsol method, and it shows that closed contour lines of SP intensity and optical potential can realize the effective trapping and guiding of cold atoms in our 1D lattices.Cold atoms are trapped in the region with a section diameter about 30 nm, by which the trap has a large intensity gradient (> 3 13 m W 10 ).
We propose and analyze a scheme to interface individual neutral atoms with nanoscale solid-state systems. The interface is enabled by optically trapping the atom via the strong near-field generated by a sharp metallic nanotip. We show that under realistic conditions, a neutral atom can be trapped with position uncertainties of just a few nanometers, and within tens of nanometers of other surfaces. Simultaneously, the guided surface plasmon modes of the nanotip allow the atom to be optically manipulated, or for fluorescence photons to be collected, with very high efficiency. Finally, we analyze the surface forces, heating and decoherence rates acting on the trapped atom.
We propose a novel gravito-optical surface trap (GOST) for neutral atoms based on one-dimensional intensity gradient cooling. The surface optical trap is composed of a blue-detuned reduced semi-Gaussian laser beam (SGB), a far-blue-detuned dark hollow beam and the gravity field. The SGB is produced by the diffraction of a collimated Gaussian laser beam passing through the straight edge of a semi-infinite opaque plate and then is reduced by an imaging lens. We calculate the intensity distribution of the reduced SGB, and study the dynamic process of the SGB intensity-gradient induced Sisyphus cooling for 87 Rb atoms by using Monte Carlo simulations. Our study shows that the proposed GOST can be used not only to trap cold atoms loaded from a standard magneto-optical trap, but also to cool the trapped atoms to an equilibrium temperature of 3.47 μK from ~120 μK, even to realize an all-optical two-dimensional Bose–Einstein condensation by using optical-potential evaporative cooling.
Ultracold atom-traps on a chip enhances the practical application of atom traps in quantum information processing, sensing, and metrology. Plasmon mediated near-field optical potentials are promising for trapping atoms. The combination of plasmonic nanostructures and ultracold atoms has the potential to create a two dimensional array of neutral atoms with lattice spacing smaller than that of lattices created from interfering light fields -- the optical lattices. We report the design, fabrication and characterization of a nano-scale array of near-field optical traps for neutral atoms using plasmonic nanostructures. The building block of the array is a metallic nano-disc fabricated on the surface of an ITO-coated glass substrate. We numerically simulate the electromagnetic field-distribution using Finite Difference Time Domain method around the nanodisc, and calculate the intensity, optical potential and the dipole force for 87^{87}87Rb atoms. The optical near-field generated from the fabricated nanostructures is experimentally characterized by using Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy. We find that the optical potential and dipole force has all the desired characteristics to trap cold atoms when a blue-detuned light-field is used to excite the nanostructures. This trap can be used for effective trapping and manipulation of isolated atoms and also for creating a lattice of neutral atoms having sub-optical wavelength lattice spacing. Near-field measurements are affected by the influence of tip on the sub-wavelength structure. We present a deconvolution method to extract the actual near-field profile from the measured data.
We propose a novel scheme to form a 2D surface array of optical micro-traps of cold atoms by using two sets of far red-detuned evanescent wave interference and a blue-detuned evanescent wave. The optical potentials of the 2D surface array of optical micro-traps are high enough to trap cold atoms released from the standard magneto-optical trap，and 87Rb atoms trapped in the array of optical micro-traps can be cooled to 2.56μK with efficient intensity-gradient Sisyphus cooling. Our study shows that the proposed 2D surface array of optical micro-traps can be used in atomic physics，atomic optics, quantum optics and so on.