Trapping ultracold gases near cryogenic materials with rapid reconfigurability

Abstract

We demonstrate a novel atom chip trapping system that allows the placement and high-resolution imaging of ultracold atoms within microns from any <100 um-thin, UHV-compatible material, while also allowing sample exchange with minimal experimental downtime. The sample is not connected to the atom chip, allowing rapid exchange without perturbing the atom chip or laser cooling apparatus. Exchange of the sample and retrapping of atoms has been performed within a week turnaround, limited only by chamber baking. Moreover, the decoupling of sample and atom chip provides the ability to independently tune the sample temperature and its position with respect to the trapped ultracold gas, which itself may remain in the focus of a high-resolution imaging system. As a first demonstration of this new system, we have confined a 700-nK cloud of 8x10^4 87Rb atoms within 100 um of a gold-mirrored 100-um-thick silicon substrate. The substrate was cooled to 35 K without use of a heat shield, while the atom chip, 120 um away, remained at room temperature. Atoms may be imaged and retrapped every 16 s, allowing rapid data collection.

4 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (11)

• Strong magnetic coupling of an ultracold gas to a superconducting waveguide cavity
• Integration of fiber coupled high-Q silicon nitride microdisks with atom chips
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• Persistent Supercurrent Atom Chip
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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Fifteen Years of Cold Matter on the Atom Chip: Promise, Realizations, and Prospects
• Sensing Short-Range Forces with a Nanosphere Matter-Wave Interferometer
• Fermionic suppression of dipolar relaxation: Observation of universal inelastic dipolar scattering
• Scanning Quantum Cryogenic Atom Microscope
• Sensitivity of ultracold atoms to quantized flux in a superconducting ring
• Fast optical transport of ultracold molecules over long distances
• Long distance optical conveyor-belt transport of ultracold ${}^{133}$Cs and ${}^{87}$Rb atoms
• Designs of magnetic atom-trap lattices for quantum simulation experiments
• Current-induced magnetization hysteresis defines atom trapping in a superconducting atomchip
• Optically Tailored Trapping Geometries for Ultracold Atoms on a Type-II Superconducting Chip
• A scanning quantum cryogenic atom microscope at 6 K