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Optics Letters

Proposal of on-chip manipulation of cold atoms with superimposed holographic gratings

Aiping Liu, Jiabei She, Xing Li, Guang-Jie Chen, Qin Wang, Wei Liu, Xifeng Ren, Chang‐Ling Zou

Published Aug 13, 2025• 1 citation

Abstract

An integrated platform, consisting of two superimposed holographic gratings (SHGs) on the cross-section of waveguides, has been proposed to facilitate atom trapping, excitation, and fluorescence collection on a chip. Two blue-detuned vortex beams diffracted from the SHGs can create an optical dipole trap, enabling the trapping of atoms without interference from the trapping optical field. A Gaussian beam is diffracted to interact with the trapped atoms, and their fluorescence is collected by the SHGs for detection. For the 87Rb atom, the numerical results show that a trap depth of 0.435 mK can be achieved with an incident power of 100 mW at wavelengths of 760 and 765 nm, respectively. The calculated collection efficiency of the SHGs at 780 nm can reach 1.03% from atoms positioned 5 μm above the surface of the chip. This setup presents a promising method for integrating atoms and photons on a chip.

DOI: 10.1364/ol.572086

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An integrated platform, consisting of two superimposed holographic gratings (SHGs) on the cross-section of waveguides, has been proposed to facilitate atom trapping, excitation, and fluorescence collection on a chip. Two blue-detuned vortex beams diffracted from the SHGs can create an optical dipole trap, enabling the trapping of atoms without interference from the trapping optical field. A Gaussian beam is diffracted to interact with the trapped atoms, and their fluorescence is collected by the SHGs for detection. For the 87Rb atom, the numerical results show that a trap depth of 0.435 mK can be achieved with an incident power of 100 mW at wavelengths of 760 and 765 nm, respectively. The calculated collection efficiency of the SHGs at 780 nm can reach 1.03% from atoms positioned 5 μm above the surface of the chip. This setup presents a promising method for integrating atoms and photons on a chip.

An on-chip multigrating device is proposed to interface single atoms and integrated photonic circuits, by guiding and focusing lasers to the area $\ensuremath{\sim}10 \ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{m}$ above the chip for trapping, state manipulation, and readout of single rubidium atoms. For the optical dipole trap, two 850-nm laser beams are diffracted and overlapped to form the lattice of a single-atom dipole trap, with the diameter of the optical dipole trap being around 2.7 $\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{m}$. Similar gratings are designed for guiding a 780-nm probe laser to excite and also collect the fluorescence of

^{87}\mathrm{Rb}

atoms. Such a device provides a compact solution for future applications of single atoms, including the single-photon source, single-atom quantum register, and single-atom quantum sensor.

Abstract Diffraction gratings have simplified the optical implementation of magneto-optical traps (MOTs) to require only a single input beam, however reaching high atom number and fast loading has proven to be a challenge. We equipped an atom chip with a grating surface and paired it with a velocity-tunable 2D+-MOT as an atomic source to facilitate efficient loading together with magnetic trapping. Using uniform grating illumination, we magneto-optically trap 1.0 ( 1 ) × 10 9 atoms within one second, cool them to 14.1 ( 3 ) μ K , and transfer a quarter of them into the magnetic chip trap. This is a key step towards simple portable quantum sensors employing (ultra-)cold atoms.

We have made magneto-optical traps (MOTs) on a chip which is able to cool and trap ~108atoms directly from a ~1cm3thermal background of87Rb. Diffraction gratings are used to manipulate the light from a single input beam to create the beams required for a MOT [1,2]. The gratings are etched into the surface of a silicon or GaAs wafer by either electron beam, or photo-lithography making them simple to fabricate and integrate into other atom chip architectures. We have developed a variety of gratings for utilisation both inside and outside a vacuum chamber - facilitating their incorporation into both new and existing devices. Unlike previously integrated cold atom sources on a chip [3,4] the atoms now sit above the surface where they can be easily imaged, manipulated and transferred into other on-chip potentials.

Grating-based structures have recently been used as components of magneto-optical traps (MOT) to simplify the setup for trapping Rb atoms. Here, we design diffractive chips to trap more than one atom species. Our full-wave simulations show that a two-dimensional (2D) grating chip can simultaneously have high force-balancing efficiency for a wavelength of 780 nm for trapping Rb atoms and a wavelength of 852 nm for Cs atoms. We fabricated and characterized a mm-scale grating chip using electron-beam lithography, and are in the process of trapping experiments. Our work opens the door to compact multi-species MOTs.

Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) have been proposed for many applications in atom interferometry, as their coherence over long evolution times promises unprecedented sensitivity. To date, BECs can be efficiently created in devices using atom chips, but these are still complex and place high demands on size, weight and power. To further simplify these setups, we equipped an atom chip with a nano-structured diffraction-grating to derive all beams for the magneto-optical trap (MOT) from a single laser beam. Moreover, using a 2D

^+

-MOT as an atomic source and a beam with uniform intensity for the grating illumination, we capture

1\times10^9

atoms in one second, cool them to

14\,μ

K, and demonstrate magnetic trapping using the atom chip. This is a major step towards the simplification of portable BEC devices for quantum sensing on earth and in space.