Reconstruction of a cold atom cloud by magnetic focusing

Abstract

Over the passed 15 years advances in laser cooling techniques have made it routinely possible to prepare cold clouds of atoms exhibiting temperatures of the order of several micro-Kelvin or less. Such low temperatures correspond to average atomic velocities of a few centimetres per second. Therefore, according to the de Broglie relationship p = h/#lambda#, the atoms increasingly exhibit wave-like behaviour and can no longer be treated solely as particles. These advances in atom manipulation have renewed interest in the field of atom optics. One of the concerns of atom optics is the manipulation of atoms with optical elements analogous to those used in photon optics. The most basic of such elements is the mirror. This thesis presents a curved mirror for paramagnetic atoms fabricated from commercial video tape. It is the smoothest magnetic mirror to date and is the third generation of mirrors fabricated by our group using magnetic recording media. Previous designs used audio tape and 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. Using fluorescence imaging we have directly imaged atoms bouncing above the mirror and, owing to its smoothness, have observed the first ever reconstruction of a cold atom cloud above a curved reflector. The atoms were collected in a magneto optical trap (MOT), cooled to a temperature of 18 #mu#K and then dropped onto the mirror. When released from a height of 13.5 mm we observed the collimation and refocusing of the cloud on consecutive bounces. Furthermore, we observed up to 14 bounces of the cloud, which corresponds to a time of #approx#1.5 s. One of the factors that limited the number of observable bounces was the presence of some finite roughness in the reflecting surface. Using images of the focused cloud at the peak of even bounces we were able to measure this roughness and found it to be 5.9 mrads. By analysing magnetic force microscope (MFM) scans of the fields above the mirror we attributed this residual roughness to the spatial inhomogeneity of magnetic particles in the tape. (author)Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN031546 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo