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Q: Quantenoptik
Q 17: Poster: Cooling and Trapping
Q 17.15: Poster
Wednesday, April 4, 2001, 12:30–15:00, AT2
Resonator dipole trap for neutral atoms — •Selim Jochim1, Henning Moritz1, Allard Mosk1, Matthias Weidemüller1, and Rudolf Grimm2 — 1Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, 69029 Heidelberg, Germany — 2Institut für Experimentalphysik, Universität Innsbruck, Austria
We present a novel far-detuned optical dipole trap which is based on a resonator-enhanced standing wave. This makes it possible to trap 105 6Li atoms in a trap that is 200 µK deep, using only 400 mW laser power. The trap is designed to study elastic collision properties and to search for Feshbach resonances of fermionic lithium.
The output of a diode-pumped Nd:YAG Laser at 1064 nm is enhanced by a factor of 130 in a near-confocal resonator. The resonator is locked to the laser frequency by a Hänsch-Couillaud scheme using a piezoelectric element to adjust the resonator length and an acousto-optical modulator to compensate for fast fluctuations. Currently, the storage time of the trap is limited by parametric heating due to technical noise to ∼1 s. By reducing this noise one can expect to reach storage times on the order of 20 s limited by the vacuum conditions (photon scattering rate ∼0.2 s−1). The atoms are trapped independent of their spin state in ∼2000 extremely anisotropic lattice sites. The axial trap frequency of 1 MHz will be used to implement resolved-sideband Raman cooling.