OSE Seminars
Ex Vacuo Atom Chips: High Rate BEC and High Gradient Traps
Presented by Dr. Spencer E. Olson, Air Force Research Laboratory
Over the past several years, atom chips have grown as a capability to manipulate and confine cold atoms in a manner that is reproducible and long-term stable. The atom chip defines planar current sources that are used to create a confining magnetic field and is easily integrated into laser cooling configurations. Typically, atoms are confined at sub-mm distances from the surface of a chip in order to achieve the highest magnetic-field gradients and hence tightest trap confinement. This implies a requirement that atom chips be placed within the ultra-high vacuum envelope where the cold atoms reside so as to achieve the smallest possible atom-surface separations. This presentation demonstrates an alternative approach in which the atom chip resides completely outside the vacuum, separated from the atoms by a thin crystalline membrane. This setup allows rapid prototyping of atom chip designs. Formation of Bose-Einstein condensation of a 87Rb cloud in this setup demonstrates the viability of this approach.
A typical atom-chip trapping sequence involves first laser cooling, transfer to a magnetic trap, state preparation/probing, and a subsequent release of atoms from the trap. This process is then repeated for further measurements. This presentation will also describe a new effort at the Air Force Research Laboratory to achieve--for the first time ever--the Lamb-Dicke regime for neutral atoms in a magnetic trap. The Lamb-Dicke regime, routine for ion traps, will allow laser cooling during the magnetic trapping stage. This should allow for much longer trap lifetimes--often on the order of weeks or more for ions--and dramatically decrease the required duration of experimental measurement cycles.
11:00 am, Thursday, February 9, 2017
PAIS-2540, PAIS
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