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Register a new userProgress in atom chips and the integration of optical microcavities
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Added by
Beno\\^it Darqui\\'e
Publication date
2008
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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We review recent progress at the Centre for Cold Matter in developing atom chips. An important advantage of miniaturizing atom traps on a chip is the possibility of obtaining very tight trapping structures with the capability of manipulating atoms on the micron length scale. We recall some of the pros and cons of bringing atoms close to the chip surface, as is required in order to make small static structures, and we discuss the relative merits of metallic, dielectric and superconducting chip surfaces. We point out that the addition of integrated optical devices on the chip can enhance its capability through single atom detection and controlled photon production. Finally, we review the status of integrated microcavities that have recently been demonstrated at our Centre and discuss their prospects for future development.
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Atoms can be trapped and guided using nano-fabricated wires on surfaces, achieving the scales required by quantum information proposals. These Atom Chips form the basis for robust and widespread applications of cold atoms ranging from atom optics to fundamental questions in mesoscopic physics, and possibly quantum information systems.
We report on the integration of small-scale optical components into silicon wafers for use in atom chips. We present an on-chip fibre-optic atom detection scheme that can probe clouds with small atom numbers. The fibres can also be used to generate microscopic dipole traps. We describe our most recent results with optical microcavities and show that single-atom detection can be realised on an atom chip. The key components have been fabricated by etching directly into the atom chip silicon substrate.
We discuss the contribution of the material type in metal wires to the electromagnetic fluctuations in magnetic microtraps close to the surface of an atom chip. We show that significant reduction of the magnetic noise can be achieved by replacing the pure noble metal wires with their dilute alloys. The alloy composition provides an additional degree of freedom which enables a controlled reduction of both magnetic noise and resistivity if the atom chip is cooled. In addition, we provide a careful re-analysis of the magnetically induced trap loss observed by Yu-Ju Lin et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 050404 (2004)] and find good agreement with an improved theory.
We show that the performance and functionality of atom-chips can be transformed by using graphene-based van der Waals heterostructures to overcome present limitations on the lifetime of the trapped atom cloud and on its proximity to the chip surface. Our analysis involves Green-function calculations of the thermal (Johnson) noise and Casimir-Polder atom-surface attraction produced by the atom-chip. This enables us to determine the lifetime limitations produced by spin-flip, tunneling and three-body collisional losses. Compared with atom-chips that use thick metallic conductors and substrates, atom-chip structures based on two-dimensional materials reduce the minimum attainable atom-surface separation to a few 100 nm and increase the lifetimes of the trapped atom clouds by orders of magnitude so that they are limited only by the quality of the background vacuum. We predict that atom-chips with two-dimensional conductors will also reduce spatial fluctuations in the trapping potential originating from imperfections in the conductor patterns. These advantages will enhance the performance of atom-chips for quantum sensing applications and for fundamental studies of complex quantum systems.
Adiabatic techniques offer some of the most promising tools to achieve high-fidelity control of the centre-of-mass degree of freedom of single atoms. As their main requirement is to follow an eigenstate of the system, constraints on timing and field strength stability are usually low, especially for trapped systems. In this paper we present a detailed example of a technique to adiabatically transport a single atom between different waveguides on an atom chip. To ensure that all conditions are fulfilled, we carry out fully three dimensional simulations of the system, using experimentally realistic parameters. We also detail our method for simulating the system in very reasonable timescales on a consumer desktop machine by leveraging the power of GPU computing.
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