Laser collimation of an Fe atomic beam on a leaky transition

Atom lithography without laser cooling

“…With the 1 mm nozzle hole diameter, the divergence of the Fe beam therefore amounts to α RMS = 0.38 mrad RMS and the spread in transverse velocity to 0.33 m/s RMS. The divergence is thus considerably larger than the best value obtained in our earlier experiments with transverse laser cooling of Fe [8] (α RMS = 0.17 m/s). However, the smallest obtained width of the deposited nanolines is equal to the width obtained with the laser collimated beam [6].…”

“…For numerous elements a closed transition is not accessible with present lasers, or hyperfine splitting is present, and the use of several repumping lasers becomes a necessity. For Fe, for instance, an accessible closed transition from the ground state does not exist, resulting in the loss of focusable atoms when applying laser cooling [8].…”

Towards creation of iron nanodots using metastable atom lithography

“…Both frequency-detuning cases have been applied to atom lithography. Recently, the direct deposition approach has been applied to the creation of Fe structures [2,4,5]; however, several fundamental limitations exist. A high flux, highly collimated, monochromatic atomic beam is required to produce structures with nanoscale dimensions that would be viable for memory storage.…”

“…The trend towards device miniaturization in this industry predicts future storage systems that will utilize structures with dimensions that approach the minimum size of the magnetic domains in magnetic materials. Novel, recently developed schemes for the production of such structures involve the use of depositional atom lithography [2,4,5]. These schemes and the scheme that we have developed have advantages over current techniques such as electron beam lithography as they are parallel processes and, with the application of laser cooling flux enhancement techniques [3], are possibly applicable to mass production of semiconductor devices.…”

Optimized loading of an optical dipole trap for the production of chromium BECs

“…Atoms that come along with a diversity of naturally abundant isotopes (such as Ytterbium and Chromium) are appealing in the prospect of producing and studying mixtures of fermionic and/or bosonic quantum degenerate gases [7]. Furthermore, group III atoms (like Aluminium, Gallium and Indium [8]) as well as Iron [9], have been optically manipulated in view of potential applications in nanofabrication. Finally, cooling of highly magnetic atoms opens the possibility to study the effect of dipole-dipole interactions in degenerated quantum gases.…”