Design and fabrication of diffractive atom chips for laser cooling and trapping

Abstract

It has recently been shown that optical reflection gratings fabricated directly into an atom chip provide a simple and effective way to trap and cool substantial clouds of atoms [1,2]. In this article we describe how the gratings are designed and micro-fabricated and we characterise their optical properties, which determine their effectiveness as a cold atom source. We use simple scalar diffraction theory to understand how the morphology of the gratings determines the power in the diffracted beams.

References in corpus (7)

• Matter-wave interferometry in a double well on an atom chip
• The Feasibility of a Fully Miniaturized Magneto-Optical Trap for Portable Ultracold Quantum Technology
• A self-interfering clock as a "which path" witness
• Measuring Energy Differences by BEC Interferometry on a Chip
• Laser cooling with a single laser beam and a planar diffractor
• Stability of a trapped atom clock on a chip
• Phase-space properties of magneto-optical traps utilising micro-fabricated gratings

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• Micro-integrated crossed-beam optical dipole trap system with long-term alignment stability for mobile atomic quantum technologies