Channeling of cold atoms along a Laguerre-Gaussian light beam

M. A. Clifford, J. Arlt, Kishan Dholakia

Jochen Arlt, T. Hitomi, Kishan Dholakia

Laurence Pruvost, Michael Mestre, Fabienne Diry +1 more

Michael Mestre, Fabienne Diry, B. Viaris de Lesegno +1 more

Gavin P. T. Lancaster, M. A. Clifford, Kishan Dholakia

Summary form only given. Extracting cold atoms from a magneto-optical trap (MOT) has been the subject of central interest in recent years. This has seen the emergence of the area of atom guiding along hollow core optical fibers and also along light beams. The guiding and the extraction of cold atoms is of central importance in generating bright, high flux atomic sources for various experiments in atom optics. In this paper we describe and experimentally realize a scheme for extracting cold atoms directly from a magnetooptical trap along a Laguerre-Gaussian light beam.

D. P. Rhodes, David M. Gherardi, J. Livesey +4 more

A spatial light modulator (SLM) has been used to create high quality Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) light beams, which have been used to study the guiding of cold rubidium atoms. The SLM allows real-time variation of the hollow guiding beam and permits direct comparison of the guided atom fluxes for different LG modes with minimal adjustment of the other optical components. It is demonstrated that, by increasing the azimuthal index l of the Laguerre–Gaussian beam, the radiation pressure pushing the trapped atoms may be reduced while maintaining the same guided flux. This is the first comparative study of hollow beam atom guiding, and further demonstrates the versatility of the SLM for studies in atom optics.