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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Diffractive chips for magneto-optical trapping of two atomic species

Zhaoning Yu, Garrett Hickman, Mark E. Saffman, Mikhail A. Kats

Published Jan 1, 2020• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate diffractive grating chips that can be used as part of a magneto-optical trap (MOT) to trap both Rb and Cs atoms with a single input beam for each atom species.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_si.2020.sth4g.7

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Grating-based structures have recently been used as components of magneto-optical traps (MOT) to simplify the setup for trapping Rb atoms. Here, we design diffractive chips to trap more than one atom species. Our full-wave simulations show that a two-dimensional (2D) grating chip can simultaneously have high force-balancing efficiency for a wavelength of 780 nm for trapping Rb atoms and a wavelength of 852 nm for Cs atoms. We fabricated and characterized a mm-scale grating chip using electron-beam lithography, and are in the process of trapping experiments. Our work opens the door to compact multi-species MOTs.
We have made magneto-optical traps (MOTs) on a chip which is able to cool and trap ~108atoms directly from a ~1cm3thermal background of87Rb. Diffraction gratings are used to manipulate the light from a single input beam to create the beams required for a MOT [1,2]. The gratings are etched into the surface of a silicon or GaAs wafer by either electron beam, or photo-lithography making them simple to fabricate and integrate into other atom chip architectures. We have developed a variety of gratings for utilisation both inside and outside a vacuum chamber - facilitating their incorporation into both new and existing devices. Unlike previously integrated cold atom sources on a chip [3,4] the atoms now sit above the surface where they can be easily imaged, manipulated and transferred into other on-chip potentials.
Abstract Diffraction gratings have simplified the optical implementation of magneto-optical traps (MOTs) to require only a single input beam, however reaching high atom number and fast loading has proven to be a challenge. We equipped an atom chip with a grating surface and paired it with a velocity-tunable 2D+-MOT as an atomic source to facilitate efficient loading together with magnetic trapping. Using uniform grating illumination, we magneto-optically trap 1.0 ( 1 ) × 10 9 atoms within one second, cool them to 14.1 ( 3 ) μ K , and transfer a quarter of them into the magnetic chip trap. This is a key step towards simple portable quantum sensors employing (ultra-)cold atoms.