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Physics World

Magnetic chips and quantum circuits for atoms

Edward A. Hinds

Published Jul 1, 2001• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Over the last few years, physicists have developed various techniques for cooling clouds of atoms to temperatures below 1 microkelvin. The atoms in these clouds are so cold that they can no longer be considered as classical particles that obey Newton's laws of motion. Rather, they are diffuse waves that spread out, diffract and interfere with each other as described by the rules of quantum mechanics.

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/14/7/33

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Over the last few years, physicists have developed various techniques for cooling clouds of atoms to temperatures below 1 microkelvin. The atoms in these clouds are so cold that they can no longer be considered as classical particles that obey Newton's laws of motion. Rather, they are diffuse waves that spread out, diffract and interfere with each other as described by the rules of quantum mechanics.
Cold atoms promise versatile atomic chipsUsing a microelectronic chip to hold a cloud of cold atoms hovering above it, physicists in Germany may have developed an "atomic chip" that might eventually shunt Bose-Einstein condensates around an atom chip -just as electrons are shunted around a conventional silicon chip.This tiny circuit creates and manipulates a peculiar state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (p21).Previously these condensates were made using light or magnetic fields to cool and confine a gas of atoms.Electric currents travelling through wires in the atom chip create a confining magnetic field barely 1 mm wide.This field holds a cloud of 1600 rubidium atoms at a height of less than a tenth of 1 mm above the chip surface.Quantum mechanics dictates that atoms, being so small, have wavelike properties.Normally each wave bobs up and down independently.However, in a Bose-Einstein condensate all of the atomic waves are "coherent" -moving in step, in the same quantum state.Instead of behaving like a
Ultra-cold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) provide a dramatic example of a quantum system on a macroscopic scale. Atoms can be cooled down to temperatures below 1μK and their de Broglie wavelengths become large enough to be readily observed in experiments. This has spawned a new research area known as atom optics which refers to the study and control of atoms based on their wave nature. In recent years, physicists have been performing experiments with coherent atoms from a Bose-Einstein condensate. The ability to produce and manipulate condensates above microfabricated surfaces may one day lead to new technologies such as atom interferometers on a chip.
Forty years ago, twenty years after the discovery of the laser, physicists were developing laser cooling methods for ions trapped in electromagnetic fields.From the 1980s onwards, these techniques were refined and extended to atoms, thanks to the audacity and inventiveness of a generation of pioneering researchers.Actually, it was necessary to succeed simultaneously in trapping and cooling samples of atomic gases in a vacuum at a distance from any wall.Spectacular results followed and extraordinarily low temperatures were quickly reached, very close to absolute zero.The field of "cold atoms" was born, rewarded by successive Nobel prizes, first of which was awarded in 1997 to William D. Phillips, Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, last in 2022 to Alain Aspect.Gaseous samples of a few thousand to a few billion atoms can be prepared at a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, which means that the particles move at extremely low speed, of the order of centimetres per second.At these extreme temperatures, the behaviour of matter changes and its properties can only be described using quantum mechanics and the wave properties of particles.New physical phenomena have been discovered and innovations have followed the theoretical and experimental progress of the research.Initially imagined as a wonderful method for perfecting atomic physics, cold atoms have gradually proved to be powerful tools for research in cross-cutting fields of physics, such as condensed matter and even high-energy physics.These atoms are now referred to as 'quantum gases' at such low temperatures that their collective behaviour is modified by the laws of quantum mechanics.
The building blocks of Nature, namely atoms and elementary particles, are described by quantum mechanics. This fundamental theory is the ground on which physicists have built their major mathematical models [1]. Today, the unique features of quantum objects have led to the advent of promising quantum technologies [2, 3]. However, the macroscopic world is manifestly classical, and the nature of the quantum-to-classical crossover remains one of the most challenging open question of Science to date. In this respect, moving objects play a specific role [4, 5]. Pioneering experiments over the last few years have begun exploring quantum behaviour of micron-sized mechanical systems, adapting laser cooling techniques developed in atomic physics to cool specific modes far below the temperature of their surroundings [6-11]. Here instead we describe a very different approach, passive cooling of a micromechanical system down to 500 microK, reducing the average number of quanta in the fundamental vibrational mode to just 0.3; the challenge being to be still able to detect the motion without disturbing the system noticeably. With such an approach higher harmonics and the surrounding environment are also cooled, leading to potentially much longer mechanical coherence times, and enabling experiments questioning mechanical wave-function collapse [12], potentially from the gravitational background [13, 14], and quantum thermodynamics [15]. Beyond the average behaviour, here we also report on the fluctuations of the fundamental vibrational mode of the device in-equilibrium with the cryostat. These reveal a surprisingly complex interplay with the local environment and allow characteristics of two distinct thermodynamic baths to be probed.