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arXiv:cond-mat/0212060 · Physica Scripta

A Source of Cold Atoms for a Continuously Loaded Magnetic Guide

Christian F. Roos, P. Cren, Jean Dalibard, David Guéry-Odelin

Published Jan 1, 2003• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present an intense source of 87 Rb atoms that has been set up to produce a continuous, slow and cold beam in a magnetic guide. It consists of a two-dimensional magneto-optical trap whose cooling laser power is provided by a master-oscillator tapered-amplifier system. This trap produces an atomic beam with a flux of over 10 10 atoms/s and a mean velocity of 40 m/s. The beam is recaptured by a second trap whose purpose consists in reducing the beam's velocity, in further cooling the atoms and injecting them into the magnetic guide. The article focusses on the first stage of the process described above.

DOI
10.1238/physica.topical.105a00019

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We present an intense source of 87 Rb atoms that has been set up to produce a continuous, slow and cold beam in a magnetic guide. It consists of a two-dimensional magneto-optical trap whose cooling laser power is provided by a master-oscillator tapered-amplifier system. This trap produces an atomic beam with a flux of over 10 10 atoms/s and a mean velocity of 40 m/s. The beam is recaptured by a second trap whose purpose consists in reducing the beam's velocity, in further cooling the atoms and injecting them into the magnetic guide. The article focusses on the first stage of the process described above.
We demonstrate experimentally the continuous and pulsed loading of a slow and cold atomic beam into a magnetic guide. The slow beam is produced using a vapor loaded laser trap, which ensures two-dimensional magneto-optical trapping, as well as cooling by a moving molasses along the third direction. It provides a continuous flux larger than 10910^9109 atoms/s with an adjustable mean velocity ranging from 0.3 to 3 m/s, and with longitudinal and transverse temperatures smaller than 100μ100 \mu100μK. Up to 31083 10^83108 atoms/s are injected into the magnetic guide and subsequently guided over a distance of 40 cm.
We discuss the implementation and characterization of the source of a slow, intense, and collimated beam of rubidium atoms. The cold atomic beam is produced by two-dimensional magneto-optical trapping in directions transverse to the atomic beam axis and unbalanced Doppler cooling in the axial direction. The vacuum design allows use of relatively low laser power and a considerably simplified assembly. The atomic beam has a high flux of about $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{10}\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{atoms}∕\mathrm{s}$ at a total cooling laser power of 55mW55\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{mW}55mW. It has a narrow longitudinal velocity distribution with mean velocity 15m∕s15\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{m}∕\mathrm{s}15m∕s with full width at half maximum 3.5m∕s3.5\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{m}∕\mathrm{s}3.5m∕s and has a low divergence of 26mrad26\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{mrad}26mrad. The high flux enables ultrafast loading of about 1010{10}^{10}1010 atoms into a three-dimensional (3D) magneto-optical trap within 500 ms. The variation of the atomic beam flux was studied as a function of the rubidium vapor pressure, cooling laser power, transverse cooling laser beam length, detuning of the cooling laser, and relative intensities of the cooling beams along the atomic beam axis. We also discuss a detailed comparison of our measurements of the cold atomic beam with a 3D numerical simulation.
We present a two-dimensional (2D) magneto-optical trap (MOT) setup for the production of a continuous collimated beam of cold 87Rb{}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb atoms out of a vapor cell. The underlying physics is purely two-dimensional cooling and trapping, which allows for a high flux of up to $6\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{10}$ atoms/s and a small divergence of the resulting beam. We analyze the velocity distribution of the 2D MOT. The longitudinal velocity distribution of the atomic beam shows a broad feature (full width at half maximum $\ensuremath{\simeq}75 \mathrm{m}/\mathrm{s}),$ centered around 50 m/s. The dependence of the flux on laser intensity, on geometry of the trapping volume, and on pressure in the vapor cell was investigated in detail. The influence of the geometry of the 2D MOT on the mean velocity of the cold beam has been studied. We present a simple model for the velocity distribution of the flux based on rate equations describing the general features of our source.
We report the continuous or pulsed loading of a slow and cold atomic beam into a magnetic guide. In order to optimize the transfer into the guide, we have studied two coupling schemes. The first one is based on an auxiliary two-dimensional MOT that confines the atoms transversally before they enter the guide. However, for low atomic velocities, the atoms are strongly heated in the longitudinal direction. This limitation does not occur in the second coupling scheme which relies on magnetic confinement in the transfer zone. For this purpose, we have constructed a miniature magnetic guide located between the atomic source and the long magnetic guide. The latter scheme allows to inject atoms with velocities down to 70 cm/s into the guide.
We experimentally study the use of two-dimensional magneto-optical trapping (2D-MOT) for the generation of slow beams of cold atoms out of a vapor cell. A particularly high flux of $9\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{9}$ rubidium atoms/s at a mean velocity of 8 m/s is obtained using a combination of magneto-optical trapping in two dimensions and Doppler cooling in the third dimension $({2\mathrm{D}}^{+}\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{MOT}).$ The resulting width of the velocity distribution is 3.3 m/s [full width at half maximum (FWHM)] with a beam divergence of 43 mrad (FWHM). We investigate the total flux as a function of vapor cell pressure and determine the velocity distribution of our slow atom sources. For comparison, we also realized a low-velocity intense source (LVIS), first reported by Lu et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 3331 (1996)]. We find that the ${2\mathrm{D}}^{+}\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{MOT}$ yields a significantly higher flux than the LVIS, even when used with an order of magnitude less laser power.
We have produced and characterized an intense, slow, and highly collimated atomic beam extracted from a standard vapor cell magneto-optical trap (MOT). The technique used is dramatically simpler than previous methods for producing very cold atomic beams. We have created a 0.6 mm diameter rubidium atomic beam with a continuous flux of $5\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{9}/\mathrm{s}$ and a pulsed flux 10 times greater. Its longitudinal velocity distribution is centered at 14 m/s with a FWHM of 2.7 m/s. Through an efficient recycling process, 70% of the atoms trapped in the MOT are loaded into the atomic beam.