An innovative and practical scheme of building far-detuned optical lattice for 87Rb atoms is proposed.The disposals of aligning the lattice beams,tuning the lattice frequency and controlling the tapered amplifier for output are described in detail.Alignment of optical lattices is quite difficult in principle,for several beams are required to hit the same atomic cloud.For the relatively near-detuned one-and two-dimensional lattices,the coarse alignment is accomplished by tuning the lattice laser onto resonance with the magnetic-optic trap(MOT) frequency,and then blowing away the MOT in real time.A more precision alignment is implemented at the end of the MOT loading,the atoms are first pumped into the lower hyperfine level by turning off the repumping for some time;then,the pulsed lattice beams are turned on for a short time at some reasonably large detuning.Finally,a fluorescent image of the MOT is taken without repumping,in order to detect only those atoms which are repumped by the lattice laser.For the purpose of controlling the detuning of the lattice easily and accurately,a home-made grating wavemeter with a resolution better than 1 GHz is used.This way allows the laser to be locked at any frequency by using a software PID and is experimentally simple to implement.The intensity of the lattice is controlled directly by pulsing the current through the tapered amplifier using a function generator and a laser diode driver.This technique has already been demonstrated before by Prof.M.Kasevich's group at Stanford. Our experiment starts with a MOT capturing approximately 4107 atoms in 200 ms.The lattice loading is overlap with the end of polarization gradient cooling(PGC),after that,the molasses laser beams are extinguished, and the adiabatic expansion is accomplished in the same time by a decrease in the lattice light intensity according to release function.On the basis of MOT and PGC,the dependences of atomic loading on such parameters as the intensity and frequency detuning of optical lattice are investigated experimentally.The vibration frequency is measured by intentionally modulating the trap intensity.Experimental results show that the lattice structure facilitates the cooling with the temperature of atoms cloud being reduced to 1/3 compared with free space polarization gradient cooling.The system design,experimental results and conclusions are of definite significance and can serve as a fine reference for other kinds of lattices designs or alkali atomic plans.
An innovative and practical scheme of building far-detuned optical lattice for 87Rb atoms is proposed.The disposals of aligning the lattice beams,tuning the lattice frequency and controlling the tapered amplifier for output are described in detail.Alignment of optical lattices is quite difficult in principle,for several beams are required to hit the same atomic cloud.For the relatively near-detuned one-and two-dimensional lattices,the coarse alignment is accomplished by tuning the lattice laser onto resonance with the magnetic-optic trap(MOT) frequency,and then blowing away the MOT in real time.A more precision alignment is implemented at the end of the MOT loading,the atoms are first pumped into the lower hyperfine level by turning off the repumping for some time;then,the pulsed lattice beams are turned on for a short time at some reasonably large detuning.Finally,a fluorescent image of the MOT is taken without repumping,in order to detect only those atoms which are repumped by the lattice laser.For the purpose of controlling the detuning of the lattice easily and accurately,a home-made grating wavemeter with a resolution better than 1 GHz is used.This way allows the laser to be locked at any frequency by using a software PID and is experimentally simple to implement.The intensity of the lattice is controlled directly by pulsing the current through the tapered amplifier using a function generator and a laser diode driver.This technique has already been demonstrated before by Prof.M.Kasevich's group at Stanford. Our experiment starts with a MOT capturing approximately 4107 atoms in 200 ms.The lattice loading is overlap with the end of polarization gradient cooling(PGC),after that,the molasses laser beams are extinguished, and the adiabatic expansion is accomplished in the same time by a decrease in the lattice light intensity according to release function.On the basis of MOT and PGC,the dependences of atomic loading on such parameters as the intensity and frequency detuning of optical lattice are investigated experimentally.The vibration frequency is measured by intentionally modulating the trap intensity.Experimental results show that the lattice structure facilitates the cooling with the temperature of atoms cloud being reduced to 1/3 compared with free space polarization gradient cooling.The system design,experimental results and conclusions are of definite significance and can serve as a fine reference for other kinds of lattices designs or alkali atomic plans.
The imaging of neutral atoms confined in an optical lattice has been demonstrated by a number of groups, resolving single fluorescing atoms in samples of hundreds of atoms. To obtain a high signal the atoms remain confined in the wells of a deep optical lattice whilst fluorescence excitation light is applied for high resolution imaging. In most cases, the excitation light frequency is chosen so that there is a concomitant laser cooling effect. In existing implementations of an imaging lattice the preceding manipulation stage has used optical trapping and manipulation. In this thesis I describe work towards applying this imaging lattice technique on a magnetic trapping apparatus, in particular for carrying out quantum simulation experiments. An introduction to the specific challenge of performing a quantum simulation of the fractional quantum Hall effect is given, with the link to and nature of the imaging lattice technique explained. The existing quantum-gas machine that has been developed to produce Bose-Einstein condensates of 87Rb in this work is then described, including the new optical lattice subsystem and the associated diode laser system. An auxiliary project to develop a servo-control system for frequencies that are several GHz away from an atomic reference is presented. We implement an optical lattice using laser light with a frequency detuning of -20 GHz below the D1-resonance line. The construction and geometry of the individual dipole trapping beams in combination with our existing apparatus is discussed as well as the alignment methods used. We confirm the presence of three independent 1D lattices through diffraction, and observe the decay of a BEC loaded into a lattice using absorption imaging. We observe good long-term alignment and operational stability of the optical lattice. This system will enable us to ultimately detect single fluorescing atoms in the optical lattice, following the application of excitation light co-propogating with lattice beams, via an imaging system with a moderate numerical aperture of 0:27.
Laser cooling of atoms is the basis of researches on ultracold atoms and molecules. It is of great importance in the study of precision measurement and quantum simulation, etc. In order to obtain ultracold cesium atomic sample with a lower temperature and a higher density, as the starting point to create ultracold cesium ground state molecules, we demonstrate in this article a method which effectively overcomes the heating from the reabsorption of scattered light in magneto-optical trap to further reduce the ultracold atomic temperature by loading atoms into a 3D optical lattices. Based on obtaining the ultracold Cs atoms in a standard magneto-optical trap, we use the compressed magneto-optical trap technology to increase ultracold Cs atomic density. Efficient loading of ultracold Cs atoms is achieved by 3D optical lattices which constructed by four lasers; the temperature of the atoms is measured by time-of-flight method. We observed the cooling result that the temperature drops from ~60.0 μK to ~11.6 μK. We also explore the dependence of the atom numbers in the lattice on the frequency of lattice lasers, and lead to the conclusion that the loading rate of the optical lattices reaches its maximum when the lattices laser’s detuning is –15.5 GHz. In the meantime, this paper investigates the use of optical lattice to suppress the heating of the ultracold atoms due to the radiation photons, in this sense, our research has far-reaching significance. Our scheme is advantageous due to its relaxed starting temperature requirement, meaning that 3D DRSC can be directly accomplished in a standard single cell vapour-loaded MOT without reliance on any additional devices such as a Zeeman slower.
This dissertation reports on the design, construction, and investigation of a pulsed optical dipole force trap which uses laser light to confine ultracold rubidium (Rb) atoms. Because the laser frequency is detuned far from the atomic resonance frequency, the optical dipole force trap is also called a "far-off-resonance trap" (FORT). The use of pulsed laser light to create an optical trap may find application in expanding the number of atomic species which can be confined. The experiments reported here are principally aimed, however, at understanding the physics of pulsed FORT dynamics in anticipation of using the free electron laser (FEL) at Jefferson Lab (Jlab) to construct a FORT. The Jlab FEL will provide a tunable, high power laser light source enabling the realization of spatially large and/or energetically deep traps which are not presently accessible with table-top laser sources. Here, a mode-locked Nd:YAG laser is used as a pulsed laser source. Since the conservative optical dipole force trap does not cool Rb atoms, ultracold atoms must be loaded into the FORT. The optical dipole force trap is formed at the focus of a Gaussian, 1.06 μm Nd:YAG laser beam which is located at the center of a high vacuum chamber and superimposed onto the center of a pre-cooled Rb atom cloud that has been previously accumulated in a magneto-optic trap (MOT). The performance of the pulsed FORT is compared to a continuous wave mode (cw) FORT which is built using the same laser beam; the operation of the two kinds of FORTs can be switched easily without disturbing the experimental alignment. The dependencies of FORT loading efficiency to FORT and MOT parameters such as FORT laser power, loading time, storage/holding time, detuning of the primary MOT laser frequency, and repump laser intensity are investigated. There are about 1.5×107 ultracold rubidium atoms in the MOT. At 7 Watts FORT laser power, about 8% of the atoms are loaded successfully into the cw FORT and about 5% into the pulsed FORT under similar, but not identical, conditions. In most respects both the cw and pulsed FORTs show comparable behavior. The behavior of both FORTs depends strongly on FORT laser power. As expected, at higher power, more atoms can be loaded into the FORT. Both FORTs also depend on the loading time and holding time.
For a quantum memory to be useful as a quantum repeater, a long coherence time is a crucial requirement. In recent years, the most commonly explored medium for quantum storage has been atomic gases. We report an experiment to realize a quantum memory based on an Rb atomic ensemble in a one-dimensional far-detuned optical lattice. A multimode 30 W continuous wave fiber laser was used to construct a travelling wave lattice with a period of 25 m. The Rb atoms were loaded into a magneto-optical-trap, which was then adjusted to optimize the polarization gradient cooling. To trap the cooled atoms, we turned on a laser which has a wavelength of 1064 nm and therefore is red-detuned from the resonance frequencies of D1 and D2 transitions of 87Rb atoms. By taking the short-distance time-of-flight image the temperature of the atoms was found to be about 20 K. This system will provide a foundation for future quantum information storage studies.
We develop a simple and practical scheme to apply sideband cooling to a cloud of rubidium atoms. A sample containing 4 × 10 70 87 Rb is trapped in a far red detuned optical lattice. Through optimizing the relevant parameters, i.e., laser detuning, magnetic field, polarization, and duration time, a temperature around 1.5 μK and phase space density close to 1/500 are achieved. Compared with polarization gradient cooling, the temperature decreases by around one order of magnitude. This technique could be used in high precision measurement such as atomic clocks and atom interferometer. It could also serve as a precooling means before evaporation cooling in a dipole trap, and may be a promising method of achieving quantum degeneracy with purely optical means.
We report a way to overcome heating due to the reabsorption of scattered light when relatively many atoms are laser cooled at high density. A sample of $8\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{7}\mathrm{Cs}$ atoms, with $6\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{11}{\mathrm{atoms}\mathrm{}\mathrm{cm}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}3},$ is loaded into a deep far-detuned one-dimensional optical lattice, which acts as a large volume three-dimensional (3D) trap. Polarization gradient cooling with a separate set of cooling beams is found to work well in this trap, populating the trap's vibrational ground state with more than half the atoms. After cooling, the lattice is shut off adiabatically, leaving a still dense sample at 1.2 \ensuremath{\mu}K. We propose and demonstrate a generalization to a 3D lattice, which will allow many more atoms to be loaded into conservative light traps, and can greatly increase the initial phase-space density for loading magnetic traps.