Enhanced quantum reflection of neutral atoms on solid surface

Pasi Ryytty, M. Kaivola

Thierry Passerat de Silans, B. Farias, Marcos Oriá +1 more

Fujio Shimizu, Jun‐ichi Fujita

A cold metastable neon atomic beam was manipulated with a reflective amplitude hologram that was encoded on a silicon surface. A black-and-white pattern of atoms was reconstructed on a microchannel plate detector. The hologram used the enhanced quantum reflection developed by authors and was made of a two-dimensional array of rectangular low and high reflective cells. The surface of the high reflective cell was composed of regularly spaced roof-shaped ridges, while the low reflective cell was simply a flat surface. The hologram was the first demonstration of reflective atom-optical elements that used universal interaction between a neutral atom and solid surface.

Thomas A. Pasquini

Recent developments in atom optics have brought Bose-Einstein condensates within 1 μm of solid surfaces where the atom-surface interactions can no longer be ignored. At longrange, the atom-surface interaction is described by the weakly attractive Casimir-Polder potential which is classically predicted to accelerate an incident atom toward the surface where it will interact strongly with the internal modes of the surface, lose energy, and land in a bound state of the surface. When the incident atom is very cold, on the order of a few nanokelvin, however, the acceleration of the atomic wavefunction is so abrupt that the atom may partially reflect from the attractive tail in a process known as quantum reflection. This work presents experimental evidence for quantum reflection from a solid surface at normal incidence. Using atoms from a 23Na BEC, cooled to a few nanokelvin in a recently demonstrated single-coil trap, controlled collisions were induced between atoms and solid silicon surface. A maximum reflection probability of ∼ 12% was observed for an incident velocity of 1 mm/s. Atoms confined against the surface at low density exhibited an enhanced lifetime due to quantum reflection. A surprising aspect of quantum reflection is that nano-structured surfaces are predicted to exhibit enhanced quantum reflection due to the reduction of the atom-surface interaction from reduced density surfaces. Using a pillared surface with an density reduced to 1% of bulk density, we observe an enhancement of the reflection probability to ∼ 60%. At velocities from 2-25 mm/s, predicted threshold dependence of the reflection probability was observed. At velocities below 2 mm/s, the reflection probability was observed to saturate. We develop a simple model which predicts the saturation as a result of mean-field interactions between atoms in the incident Bose-Einstein condensate. Thesis Supervisor: Wolfgang Ketterle Title: John D. MacAurthur Professor of Physics Thesis Supervisor: David E. Pritchard Title: Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics For the parents in my life,

Jean-Louis Basdevant, Jean Dalibard