Design for an optical cw atom laser

Abstract

A new type of optical cw atom laser design is proposed that should operate at high intensity and high coherence and possibly record low temperatures. It is based on an ''optical-shepherd'' technique, in which far-off-resonance blue-detuned swept sheet laser beams are used to make new types of high-density traps, atom waveguides, and other components for achieving very efficient Bose-Einstein condensation and cw atom laser operation. A shepherd-enhanced trap is proposed that should be superior to conventional magneto-optic traps for the initial collection of molassescooled atoms. A type of dark-spot optical trap is devised that can cool large numbers of atoms to polarization-gradient temperatures at densities limited only by three-body collisional loss. A scheme is designed to use shepherd beams to capture and recycle essentially all of the escaped atoms in evaporative cooling, thereby increasing the condensate output by several orders of magnitude. Condensate atoms are stored in a shepherd trap, protected from absorbing light, under effectively zero-gravity conditions, and coupled out directly into an optical waveguide. Many experiments and devices may be possible with this cw atom laser.

Expansion velocity of a one-dimensional, two-component Fermi gas during the sudden expansion in the ballistic regime

“…We first discuss this idealized case to avoid the complication of dealing with particles originating from different shells, as would be the case with a harmonic trap (note, though, that box-like traps can also be generated in experiments [41,42]). A typical example for the timeevolution of the density n i (t) is shown in Fig.…”

Utilization of Optical Tweezer Nanotechnology in Membrane Interaction Studies

“…Ashkin utilized a novel optical CW atom laser in 2004, which utilized evaporative cooling to condense the atoms within the trap. The novel laser, thus, facilitated the study of membrane interaction by conserving the specimen of interest [9]. Such studies include examining the effects of forces applied to the membrane and their cumulative effect on function.…”

Deep dark all-optical atom trap created by the combination of the cosine-Gauss light beams

“…The so-called optical dark traps (ODT) for atom particles [1][2][3][4] are characterized by two fundamental properties: (a) the spatial trapping region tr Ω is 'dark', i.e. it is free both from the optical radiation and from the influence of magnetostatic, electrostatic and radiofrequency fields in the case of the all-optical dark trap, (b) the light-induced trapping forces act only near the boundary tr ∂ Ω of the tr Ω and prevent particles from escaping from the region tr Ω , e.g.…”