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Canadian Journal of Physics

Article

William Arie van Wijngaarden, J. J. Clarke

Published Apr 1, 1998• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A neutral atom trap is proposed consisting of a magnetic field generated by a pair of anti-Helmholtz coils and a fringing electric field of a parallel plate capacitor. The electric field shifts the energy minimum ofthe trap away from the point where the magnetic field is zero thus preventingatom loss from the trap due to Majorana transitions. This trap offers someadvantages over existing traps that are used to study cold atoms.PACS Nos.: 32.80Pj and 03.75Fi

DOI
10.1139/p98-015

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A neutral atom trap is proposed consisting of a magnetic field generated by a pair of anti-Helmholtz coils and a fringing electric field of a parallel plate capacitor. The electric field shifts the energy minimum ofthe trap away from the point where the magnetic field is zero thus preventingatom loss from the trap due to Majorana transitions. This trap offers someadvantages over existing traps that are used to study cold atoms.PACS Nos.: 32.80Pj and 03.75Fi
We describe the design, construction and performance of three realizations of a high-field superconducting magnetic trap for neutral atoms and molecules. Each of these traps utilizes a pair of coaxial coils in the anti-Helmholtz geometry and achieves depths greater than 4 T, allowing it to capture magnetic atoms and molecules cooled in a cryogenic buffer gas. Achieving this depth requires that the repulsive force between the coils (which can exceed 30 metric tons) be contained. We also describe additional features of the traps, including the elimination of trapped fluxes from the coils and the integration of the coils into a cryogenic vacuum environment suitable for producing cold atoms and molecules.
Magnetic trapping of laser-cooled neutral atoms has been demonstrated at NBS and is progressing in other laboratories. Confinement of any object requires exchanging kinetic for potential energy, and for neutral atoms, this necessarily derives from shifts of internal energy levels. This is implemented through the force experienced by the atomic magnetic moment in a carefully designed, highly inhomogeneous field. Since magnetic fields of convenient strength can shift atomic energy levels by only a few gigahertz (temperature ≌ 0.1 K), neutral atom traps are very shallow and must be loaded with very cold atoms. We present some motivations for using magnetic traps and then discuss the constraints and optimal configurations of various arrangements. For example, no trap can be isotropic. Next we discuss both the classical and quantum mechanical motions of trapped atoms. These motions are important for at least two reasons: First, several schemes under study for further cooling depend on knowing the position and velocity of the atoms, as well as the vector field at each point along the orbit. Second, magnetic traps depend on the atomic moment remaining aligned with the field as the atom orbits in the trap, and this precludes rapid motion through a low-field region.
We have constructed a permanent-magnet trap that provides a tightly confining potential useful for producing dense ultracold atomic vapors.1 This trap will be used to investigate quantum-statistical effects of 6Li and 7Li. Permanent magnets can produce field strengths and gradients comparable to those of superconducting-magnet traps but with reduced complexity and greater optical access. Our trap uses an arrangement of magnets in an Ioffe configuration,2 which features a nonzero magnetic-field minimum. Atoms are trapped about this minimum through the interaction of their total magnetic moment with the trap's magnetic field. The nonzero minimum prevents trap- loss-producing spin-flip (Majorana) transitions.
We propose two double-well magnetic traps for cold neutral atoms that use current-carrying wires. These traps can be used to trap two different atomic species. The spatial distributions of the magnetic fields, gradients, and curvatures from these two wire configurations were calculated and analyzed. Our study shows that the double-well traps proposed here can be continuously changed into single-well traps by reduction of the current in a wire (or a coil) and vice versa and that a maximum field gradient greater than 5×104 G/cm and a maximum field curvature (at each trap center) greater than 2.5×107 G/cm2 can be generated in our double-well traps and used to achieve two-species Bose–Einstein condensations and study the properties of double-well Bose–Einstein condensations or to achieve sympathetic cooling between two atomic samples or even to achieve two-species magneto-optical traps and study cold collisions between two atomic samples.
In this article, a novel ac electro-magnetic trap for neutral atoms is proposed, which is based on the interaction of a magnetic dipole moment of trapped atoms with both an ac quadruple magnetic field in the transverse direction and a dc-bias magnetic field along the axial direction. The result shows that this is an ideal strong field-seeking trap for cold atoms. An atom guide with radial trapping potential over 1.2 mK is obtained and the guided atoms can be confined in a small region of r～50 μm. With changing the distribution of the bias magnetic field, an ac magneitc trap of cold atoms with axial potential depth 0.5 mK and radial potential 0.6 mK can be got, which is high enough to trap nearly all atoms with a temperature of ～120 μK.