Simpler laser cooling offers route to chip-scale cold atom devices
27 Jan 2021
NIST project employs metasurface beam shaping and planar optics.
Caught in a trap: laser cooling
Laser cooling, in which carefully arranged laser beams can reduce the momentum of an atom to the point where the it can be individually caught by a magnetic field, is an important technology for future quantum networking and other applications.
The optical platforms to produce and trap these cold atoms have to date tended to be large and complex, limiting the practical uses to which the principle has been put.
A project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has now developed a more straightforward approach, potentially opening the way to chip-scale manufacturable devices utilizing cold atoms.
Miniaturization of Optical Components Enables Atom Cooling | Research & Technology | Jan 2021 photonics.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from photonics.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Home > Press > Bringing Atoms to a Standstill: NIST Miniaturizes Laser Cooling January
Credit: NIST
Illustration of a new optical system to miniaturize the laser cooling of atoms, a key step towards cooling atoms on a microchip. A beam of laser light is launched from a photonic integrated circuit (PIC), aided by an element called an extreme mode converter (EMC) that greatly expands the beam. The beam then strikes a carefully engineered, ultrathin film known as a metasurface (MS), which is studded with tiny pillars that further expand and shape the beam. The beam is diffracted from a grating chip to form multiple overlapping laser beams inside a vacuum chamber. The combination of laser beams and a magnetic field efficiently cools and traps a large collection of gaseous atoms in a magneto-optical trap (MOT).
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Illustration of a new optical system to miniaturize the laser cooling of atoms, a key step towards cooling atoms on a microchip. A beam of laser light is launched from a photonic integrated circuit (PIC), aided by an element called an extreme mode converter (EMC) that greatly expands the beam. The beam then strikes a carefully engineered, ultrathin film known as a metasurface (MS), which is studded with tiny pillars that further expand and shape the beam. The beam is diffracted from a grating chip to form multiple overlapping laser beams inside a vacuum chamber. The combination of laser beams and a magnetic field efficiently cools and traps a large collection of gaseous atoms in a magneto-optical trap (MOT).