A compact and efficient strontium oven for laser-cooling experiments

Abstract

Here we describe a compact and efficient strontium oven well suited for laser-cooling experiments. Novel design solutions allowed us to produce a collimated strontium atomic beam with a flux of 1.0\times10^13 s^-1 cm^-2 at the oven temperature of 450 °C, reached with an electrical power consumption of 36 W. The oven is based on a stainless-steel reservoir, filled with 6 g of metallic strontium, electrically heated in a vacuum environment by a tantalum wire threaded through an alumina multi-bore tube. The oven can be hosted in a standard DN40CF cube and has an estimated continuous operation lifetime of 10 years. This oven can be used for other alkali and alkaline earth metals with essentially no modifications.

6 pages, 6 figures, Review of Scientific Instruments, in press

References in corpus (4)

• Multipolar theory of black-body radiation shift of atomic energy levels and its implications for optical lattice clocks
• The absolute frequency of the 87Sr optical clock transition
• Spectroscopy of strontium Rydberg states using electromagnetically induced transparency
• A vapor cell based on dispensers for laser spectroscopy