Atomic Optics

Dana Z. Anderson, Victor M. Bright, Leslie Czaia +4 more

By utilizing the wave nature of atoms, one can devise a variety of atom-based devices and systems in analogy with optical versions. Integrated atom optics seeks to do for atom optics what integration has done for photon-optics, namely to miniaturize and turn atom optics into a practical technology. Already a variety of atom optical waveguides and beamsplitters have been demonstrated in research labs and now attention is turning towards the integration of coherent atom sources, that is, Bose-Einstein condensates, directly onto atom "chips." We describe some of most recent work in integrated atom optics and some of our own efforts to miniaturize atom optics systems with the help of MEMS technology.

Pierre Meystre

Ji Xian-Ming, Jin Jian-ping

With the fast development and perfecting of laser cooling, trapping and manipulating of neutral atoms as well as microelectric fabrication techniques with micrometer and nanometer scale, a new branch subject of atom optics, atom optics and its atom has been formed. In this lecture, we mainly introduce integrated schemes and experimental results as well as recent progress of integrated atom optics and its atom chips, including the design schemes, microfabrication techniques and recent experimental results of atom optical elements and devices with surface microstructures, magnetic microstructure integrated atom optics, all optical microstructure integrated atom optics,and magneto-optical microstructure integrated atom optics and their atom chips. Finally, design principles of integrated atom chip and its open problems are discussed, and some potential application of integrated atom optics and its future development are briefly looked ahead.

Charles S. Adams, M. Sigel, J. Mlynek

V. I. Balykin, Wonho Jhe

Xiaolei Guan, Wei Zhuang, Tiantian Shi +4 more

Atomic optical filters such as Faraday anomalous dispersion optical filters (FADOFs) or similar technologies can achieve very narrow optical bandwidth close to the scale of atomic linewidth, which can be greatly reduced in cold atoms. However, limited by the number of cold atoms and the size of the cold atomic cloud, the number of atoms interacting with the laser is reduced, and the transmission remains as low as 2%. In this work, we introduce the optical pumping into the cold atomic optical filter to solve this problem. Circular polarized optical pumping can produce polarization of the atomic ensemble and induce dichromatic as well as the Faraday rotation. We demonstrate a cold-atom optical filter which operates on the 87Rb 52S1/2 (F=2) to 52P3/2 (F′=2) transition at 780 nm. The filter achieves an ultranarrow bandwidth of 6.6(4) MHz, and its peak transmission is 15.6%, which is nearly 14 times higher than that of the cold-atom optical filter realized by Faraday magneto-optic effect. This scheme can be extended to almost all kinds of atomic optical filters and may find applications in self-stabilizing laser and active optical clock.