Compact vacuum systems are key enabling components for cold atom technologies, facilitating extremely accurate sensing applications. There has been important progress towards a truly portable compact vacuum system, however size, weight and power consumption can be prohibitively large, optical access may be limited, and active pumping is often required. Here, we present a centilitre-scale ceramic vacuum chamber with He-impermeable viewports and an integrated diffractive optic, enabling robust laser cooling with light from a single polarization-maintaining fibre. A cold atom demonstrator based on the vacuum cell delivers 10 7 laser-cooled 87 Rb atoms per second, using minimal electrical power. With continuous Rb gas emission active pumping yields a 10 −7 mbar equilibrium pressure, and passive pumping stabilises to 3 × 10 −6 mbar, with a 17 day time constant. A vacuum cell, with no Rb dispensing and only passive pumping, has currently kept a similar pressure for more than 500 days. The passive-pumping vacuum lifetime is several years, estimated from short-term He throughput, with many foreseeable improvements. This technology enables wide-ranging mobilization of ultracold quantum metrology.

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We demonstrate the integration of micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) scanning mirrors as active elements for the local optical pumping of ultra-cold atoms in a magneto-optical trap. A pair of MEMS mirrors steer a focused resonant beam through a cloud of trapped atoms shelved in the F = 1 ground-state of 87Rb for spatially selective fluorescence of the atom cloud. Two-dimensional control is demonstrated by forming geometrical patterns along the imaging axis of the cold atom ensemble. Such control of the atomic ensemble with a microfabricated mirror pair could find applications in single atom selection, local optical pumping, and arbitrary cloud shaping. This approach has significant potential for miniaturization and in creating portable control systems for quantum optic experiments.