Detailed study of a transverse field Zeeman slower

Abstract

We present a thorough analysis of a Zeeman slower for sodium atoms made of permanent magnets in a Halbach configuration. Due to the orientation of the magnetic field, the polarisation of the slowing laser beam cannot be purely circular leading to optical leakages into dark states. To circumvent this effect, we propose an atomic state preparation stage able to significantly increase the performances of the Zeeman slower. After a careful theoretical analysis of the problem, we experimentally implement an optical pumping stage leading to an increase of the magneto-optical trap loading rate by 3.5. Such method is easy to set up and could be extended to other Zeeman slower architectures.

References in corpus (7)

• Large atom number Bose-Einstein Condensate machines
• A compact high-flux source of cold sodium atoms
• Zeeman slowers made simple with permanent magnets in a Halbach configuration
• A Zeeman Slower based on magnetic dipoles
• Zeeman Slowers for Strontium based on Permanent Magnets
• Self-assembled Zeeman slower based on spherical permanent magnets
• Longitudinal Zeeman slowers based on permanent magnetic dipoles

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Efficient water-cooled Bitter-type electromagnet for Zeeman slowing in cold-atom experiments
• Permanent magnet based Zeeman slower for lithium atoms