Speaker
Description
Cold-atom-based inertial sensors employ ultra-cold neutral atoms to improve sensitivity and accuracy. Evaporative cooling is a widely used process to reach ultra-cold temperatures, and dynamic optical dipole traps (ODTs) have demonstrated <100 nano-Kelvin in evaporation timescales of 1 s. We previously developed a numerical model that predicted the evolution of temperature and atom number during evaporative cooling processes based on experimental parameters. Using this model, we found that spatially-modulated optical traps can cool to lower temperatures while losing fewer atoms than unmodulated traps. Guided by numerical simulations, we report on the design and construction of a dynamic crossed-beam ODT used to cool thermal clouds of rubidium-87 atoms to the nano-Kelvin regime. Using a high-powered 1064 nm laser and two acousto-optic deflectors, we generate two independent time-varying optical potentials with user-defined spatial profiles. We also describe a fluorescence imaging system to measure the trap dynamics in situ. Our all-optical dynamic evaporation approach is applicable to a wide variety of neutral atom species.
| Keyword-1 | Evaporative cooling |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | Quantum sensing |
| Keyword-3 | Ultracold Matter |