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Published February 1995 | Published
Journal Article Open

Creating long-lived neutral-atom traps in a cryogenic environment

Abstract

We describe techniques for creating long-lived magneto-optical and magnetostatic traps for neutral atoms. These traps exist in a sealed cryogenic environment with a temperature near 4 K, where the background gas pressure can be extremely low. To date we have observed cesium magneto-optical traps with background-limited lifetimes in excess of 1 h, and magnetostatic traps with lifetimes of nearly 10 min. From these observations we use the known He-Cs van der Waals collision cross section to infer typical background gas pressures in our apparatus below 4×10^(-12) Torr. With hardware improvements we expect this pressure can be made much lower, extending the magnetostatic-trap lifetimes one to two orders of magnitude. Furthermore, with a cryogenic system one can use superconducting magnets and SQUID detectors to trap and to nondestructively sense spin-polarized atoms. With superconducting microstructures one can achieve very large magnetic-field gradients and curvatures, as high as ∼10^6 G/cm and ∼10^9 G/cm^2, respectively, for use in magnetic and magneto-optical traps.

Additional Information

© 1995 The American Physical Society. Received 11 July 1994; revised manuscript received 29 September 1994. We thank H. J. Kimble and members of the California Institute of Technology Quantum Optics group for frequent technical and scientific assistance, and also Richard Boyd and Gane Wong for useful discussions. This work was supported by the AT&T Special Grants Program, the Hale Foundation, and the California Institute of Technology.

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August 20, 2023
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