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Miniature atom bottle traps enabled by chiral doughnut light

Jun Tang Yuan, Koray Köksal, V. E. Lembessis, M. Babiker

Published Jul 21, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A novel optical set-up which enables cold atoms to be trapped in a finite set of miniature (sub-wavelength) bottle traps is highlighted. These bottle traps are formed when the atoms interact with a tightly focused standing wave due to two-counter propagating optical vortex beams possessing the same winding number $\ell=\pm1$ and the same circular polarization ($\sigma=\mp 1)$. Tight focusing generates strong longitudinal field components which become responsible for an on-axis standing wave. The resulting optical potential leads to the axial confinement of far blue-detuned atoms. This completes the formation of the bottle trap, since the off-axis radial confinement is, as usual, provided by the optical potential due to the interference of the transverse components of the light. The main characteristics of the bottle traps are illustrated using typical experimentally-accessible parameters. Due to the spin-orbit coupling the trap parameters are tunable by changing the ellipicity of the light.

DOI
10.1364/opticaopen.23717016.v1

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A novel optical set-up which enables cold atoms to be trapped in a finite set of miniature (sub-wavelength) bottle traps is highlighted. These bottle traps are formed when the atoms interact with a tightly focused standing wave due to two-counter propagating optical vortex beams possessing the same winding number ℓ=±1\ell=\pm1ℓ=±1 and the same circular polarization (σ=∓1)\sigma=\mp 1)σ=∓1). Tight focusing generates strong longitudinal field components which become responsible for an on-axis standing wave. The resulting optical potential leads to the axial confinement of far blue-detuned atoms. This completes the formation of the bottle trap, since the off-axis radial confinement is, as usual, provided by the optical potential due to the interference of the transverse components of the light. The main characteristics of the bottle traps are illustrated using typical experimentally-accessible parameters. Due to the spin-orbit coupling the trap parameters are tunable by changing the ellipicity of the light.
A novel optical set-up which enables cold atoms to be trapped in a finite set of miniature (sub-wavelength) bottle traps is highlighted. These bottle traps are formed when the atoms interact with a tightly focused standing wave due to two-counter propagating optical vortex beams possessing the same winding number ℓ=±1\ell=\pm1ℓ=±1 and the same circular polarization (σ=∓1)\sigma=\mp 1)σ=∓1). Tight focusing generates strong longitudinal field components which become responsible for an on-axis standing wave. The resulting optical potential leads to the axial confinement of far blue-detuned atoms. This completes the formation of the bottle trap, since the off-axis radial confinement is, as usual, provided by the optical potential due to the interference of the transverse components of the light. The main characteristics of the bottle traps are illustrated using typical experimentally-accessible parameters. Due to the spin-orbit coupling the trap parameters are tunable by changing the ellipicity of the light.
We highlight what we believe to be a novel optical set-up which enables the confinement of cold atoms in a finite set of sub-wavelength bottle traps. This involves two counter-propagating vortex beams with the same winding number ℓ = ±1 and the same circular polarization (σ=∓1)\sigma =\mp 1)σ=∓1). Strong focusing generates significant longitudinal field components which become responsible for an on-axis standing wave enabling the axial confinement of far blue-detuned atoms. The off-axis radial confinement is provided by the optical potential due to the transverse components of the light. The trap characteristics are illustrated using experimentally accessible parameters and are tunable by changing the power, focusing and ellipticity of the light. Atoms trapped in such a set-up are useful for applications, including quantum simulation and quantum information processing.
We discuss our recent experimental demonstrations of three novel atom traps which are all based on the optical dipole force in far-detuned laser light. In the gravito-optical surface trap (GOST), Cs atoms are trapped and cooled by means of an evanescent-wave mirror very closely above a dielectric surface. This trap allows for optical cooling at very high densities and provides good starting conditions for evaporative cooling to quantum degeneracy and the realization of a 2D quantum gas. The conical atom trap (CAT) uses a hollow blue-detuned laser beam in combination with gravity to trap atoms in a dark spatial region. This trap is experimentally simple and provides high loading efficiency, tight confinement, efficient sub-Doppler cooling, and strong suppression of collisional losses. The standing-wave red-detuned (STAR) trap allows one to confine atoms in a shallow optical potential at a very low photon scattering rate, and is thus an interesting tool for studies of the atomic ground-state dynamics in external electro-magnetic fields. We have studied atomic spin polarization in this trap.
We present an efficient three-dimensional dark-focus optical trapping potential for neutral atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates. This ``optical bottle'' is created by a single blue-detuned light field exploiting the phenomenon of conical refraction occurring in biaxial crystals. The conversion of a Gaussian input beam to the bottle beam has an efficiency of close to 100% and the optical setup requires the addition of the biaxial crystal and a circular polarizer only. Based on the conical-refraction theory, we derive the general form of the potential, the trapping frequencies, and the potential barrier heights. We present experiments on confining a 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb Bose-Einstein condensate in three dimensions. We determine the trap shape, the vibrational frequencies along the weak axis, as well as the lifetime of ultracold atoms in this type of potential.
We consider the optical dipole potential energy, which arises from the interaction of a two-level atom with a circularly polarized Laguerre-Gaussian laser beam of small waist. The beam is characterized by the existence of a longitudinal electric field component which is responsible for the appearance of a chiral term in the optical dipole potential energy. This term reverses sign if either the winding number or the wave polarization of the beam reverses sign. We propose a scheme of a bi-chromatic vortex interaction with the two-level atom in which the resulting optical dipole potential is fully chiral.