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Antireflection coated semiconductor laser amplifier for Bose-Einstein condensation experiments

Saurabh Pandey, Hèctor Mas, Giannis Drougakis, Kostas G. Mavrakis, Mikis Mylonakis, Georgios Vasilakis, Vasiliki Bolpasi, Wolf von Klitzing

Published Sep 1, 2018• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present a slave laser highly suitable for the preparation and detection of 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC). A highly anti-reflection coated laser diode serves as an optical amplifier, which requires neither active temperature stabilization nor dedicated equipment monitoring the spectral purity of the amplified light. The laser power can be controlled with a precision of 10 μW in 70 mW with relative fluctuations down to 2 × 10−4. Due to its simplicity and reliability, this slave laser will be a useful tool for laboratory, mobile, or even space-based cold-atom experiments. By the way of demonstration this slave laser was used as the sole 780 nm light-source in the production of 3 × 104 BECs in a hybrid magnetic/dipole trap.

DOI
10.1063/1.5047839

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We present a slave laser highly suitable for the preparation and detection of 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC). A highly anti-reflection coated laser diode serves as an optical amplifier, which requires neither active temperature stabilization nor dedicated equipment monitoring the spectral purity of the amplified light. The laser power can be controlled with a precision of 10 μW in 70 mW with relative fluctuations down to 2 × 10−4. Due to its simplicity and reliability, this slave laser will be a useful tool for laboratory, mobile, or even space-based cold-atom experiments. By the way of demonstration this slave laser was used as the sole 780 nm light-source in the production of 3 × 104 BECs in a hybrid magnetic/dipole trap.
An all diode laser system has been constructed for the confinement of 7 Li in a magneto-optical trap (MOT), which is the first stage in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) experiment. The system is based around an anti-reflection coated broad-area laser which provides the MOT power. The system allows the production of a MOT containing 1.6×10 10 atoms at 600 μK and densities in excess of 2×10 11 atoms/cm 3 . In addition, a magnetic field control system has been implemented using feedback from an Ultrastab 866 current sensor. The system provides a fractional current stability of 1 part in 10 4 —a factor of four improvement over the previous scheme where the current limit of the supply was relied upon for stability.
In the development of the Cold Atom Physics Research Rack (CAPR) on board the Chinese Space Station, the laser system plays a critical role in preparing the all-optical 87Rb Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs). An all-fiber laser system has been developed for CAPR to provide the required optical fields for atom interaction and to maintain the beam pointing in long-term operation. The laser system integrates a 780 nm fiber laser system and an all-fiber optical control module for sub-Doppler cooling, as well as an all-fiber 1064 nm laser system for evaporative cooling. The high-power, single-frequency 780 nm lasers are achieved through rare-Earth doped fiber amplification, fiber frequency-doubling, and frequency stabilization technology. The all-fiber optical control module divides the output of the 780 nm laser system into 15 channels and regulates them for cooling, trapping, and probing atoms. Moreover, the power consistency of each pair of cooling beams is ensured by three power tracking modules, which is a prerequisite for maintaining stable MOT and molasses. A high-power, compact, controlled-flexible, and highly stable l064 nm all-fiber laser system employing two-stage ytterbium-doped fiber amplifier (YDFA) technology has been designed for evaporative cooling in the optical dipole trap (ODT). Finally, an all-optical 87Rb BEC is realized with this all-fiber laser system, which provides an alternative solution for trapping and manipulating ultra-cold atoms in challenging environmental conditions.
We have developed a semiconductor laser system used in 40K-87Rb trapping and cooling experiment. The laser diode system is composed of three external cavity diode lasers and four injection diode lasers and a tapered amplifier. Four laser beams used for 40K and 87Rb cooling and repump lights are obtained by using acoustic optic modulators to offset the frequencies from the three external cavity diode lasers. Four light beams with different frequencies are injected into four slave lasers for injection locking. Then Rb cooling light, K cooling light and K repump light are injected into a semiconductor tapered amplifier in a master oscillator-power configuration. This configuration is flexible and stable and can simultaneously produce the cooling and repump light for 40K and 87Rb trapping and cooling experiment.
Research on degenerate quantum gases of dilute atomic gases has become a well established field in modern physics and revealed many astonishing phenomena. The first experiments on Bose and Fermi gases at low temperatures aimed to prove the predictions of quantum mechanics on a macroscopic scale. Since then we make use of Bose and Fermi gases and mixtures of any combination to model other many body systems. A property of Bose Einstein condensates is superfluidity which we want to investigate further in toroidal potentials with a new apparatus which can produce an all-optical BEC. This means trapping thermal atoms in an optical dipole trap and cooling the sample by evaporation into the quantum degenerate regime. This new technique was first successfully demonstrated by M.D. Barrett et al. in 2001 and promises to be faster and simpler than the well established and common way of evaporation in magnetic traps. A new apparatus was built by the author and we report on the experimental details of the trapping of 87Rb atoms from a hot vapour and cooling them in a magneto-optical trap, and further evaporation to quantum degeneracy in a crossed optical dipole trap operating at a wavelength of l = 1064nm, with accurate control of the power in both beams via a feedback loop. The evaporation of neutral atoms of 87Rb in far red detuned optical dipole traps using linearly polarised laser light is spin independent, and mixed spinor condensates of the F=1 manifold can be formed. As an empirical technique we found by applying a magnetic gradient field during the final evaporation that we can selectively populate mF spin states or prepare mixtures. This intriguing mechanism was found earlier as well by M. S. Chang, but is yet not fully understood and subject of our future research. We can now routinely prepare an almost pure condensate containing up to 7000 atoms in the condensed phase purely in the mF = 0 spin state. This thesis contains the theoretical framework of Bose-Einstein condensation with in mean-field theory, the concepts of cooling of atoms in magneto-optical traps, the trapping and evaporation in optical dipole traps and the experimental realisation. In the future this experiment will be extended by a fast scanning dipole trap to apply arbitrary time averaged potentials of more complex geometries, such as toroidal traps to study the effects of superfluidity in a periodic potential. The production of toroidal traps and cold atoms in such a trap are outlined in this thesis.
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.
The realization of Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) is of great interest for both fundamental research and emerging applications such as high-precision quantum sensors, atom interferometers, gravimeters, and “atom lasers” exploiting the coherence of atomic waves [1]. To investigate fundamental principles - e.g. the equivalence of heavy mass and inertial mass - BECs have been created and examined in weightlessness in the Bremen drop tower in 2007 (QUANTUS) and on board a sounding rocket in 2017 (MAIUS) [2]. Building on these missions, further atom-optical experiments are planned for the International Space Station (ISS). All these experiments rely on coherent, monochromatic, frequency-stabilized laser light for cooling and manipulating cold atoms.