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arXiv:quant-ph/0304003 · Applied Physics Letters

Atom mirror etched from a hard drive

Benjamin Lev, Y. Lassailly, Chungsok Lee, Axel Scherer, Hideo Mabuchi

Published Jul 10, 2003• 22 citations
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Abstract

We describe the fabrication of an atom mirror by etching of a common hard drive, and we report the observation of specular retroreflection of 11 μK cesium atoms using this mirror. The atoms were trapped and cooled above the hard drive using the mirror magneto-optical trap technique, and upon release, two full bounces were detected. The hard drive atom mirror will be a useful tool for both atom optics and quantum computation.

DOI
10.1063/1.1592305

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We describe the fabrication of an atom mirror by etching of a common hard drive, and we report the observation of specular retroreflection of 11 μK cesium atoms using this mirror. The atoms were trapped and cooled above the hard drive using the mirror magneto-optical trap technique, and upon release, two full bounces were detected. The hard drive atom mirror will be a useful tool for both atom optics and quantum computation.
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We have demonstrated that cold atoms can be retroflected from a ferromagnetic surface by the Stern-Gerlach effect. When the surface is magnetized periodically, the reflectivity for suitably polarized atoms is $(94\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}8)%$ and the reflection is specular. A demagnetized surface is also highly reflecting but the reflections are diffuse. These magnetic processes are of interest for atom optics because they permit the manipulation of cold atoms without the use of laser beams. In our experiments, Rb atoms released from a magneto-optic trap (MOT) fall under gravity until they are reflected, after which they are recaptured in the MOT. Multiple bounces of these atoms have been studied for times up to 600 ms.
Multiple bounces of cold rubidium atoms have been observed for times up to one second in a trap formed by gravity and a 2 cm-diameter spherical mirror made from a sinusoidally magnetized floppy disk. We have studied the dynamics of the atoms bouncing in this trap from several different heights up to 40.5 mm and we conclude that the atoms are reflected specularly and with reflectivity 1.01(3). Slight roughness of the mirror is caused by harmonics in the magnetization of the surface and by discontinuities at the boundaries between recorded tracks. As the next step in this atom optics program we propose using a magnetic mirror to create a 2D atomic gas. We discuss how cold atoms can be loaded into the ground state of a static magnetic potential well that exists above the surface of the mirror as a consequence of the intermediate-field Zeeman effect.
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Optical dipole traps and atom chips are two very powerful tools for the quantum manipulation of neutral atoms. We demonstrate that both methods can be combined by creating an optical lattice potential on an atom chip. A red-detuned laser beam is retroreflected using the atom chip surface as a high-quality mirror, generating a vertical array of purely optical oblate traps. We transfer thermal atoms from the chip into the lattice and observe cooling into the two-dimensional regime. Using a chip-generated Bose-Einstein condensate, we demonstrate coherent Bloch oscillations in the lattice.
A Magneto-Optical Trap (MOT) for 87Rb^{87}Rb87Rb atoms near the surface of a dielectric coated mirror at the top of a small 20×25×40  mm320{\times}25{\times}40\;mm^320×25×40mm3 cell has been observed. Two beams of 3.3  mW/cm23.3\;mW/cm^23.3mW/cm2 were used for optical cooling and an anti-Helmholtz magnetic field with a spatial gradient of 9.1 G/cm was used for magnetic trapping. The thickness of the mirror coated on a cover glass was less than 100μm100{\mu}m100μm . The mirror covered the top of a cell and the atom-chip was located outside the vacuum in order to exploit the long life time of the mirror and easy operation of the chip. The trapping position was found 5 mm beneath the mirror surface. The number of trapped atoms was roughly 3×1073{\times}10^73×107 atoms and the temperature was approximately a few tens mK. In this paper, we describe the construction of the mirror-MOT in detail.