… best served cold
Uncertain Principles: What Do You Need to Make Cold Atoms? Part 1: Vacuum Hardware
Excellent vacuum chamber porn.
The huge number of ports on this chamber are there to provide lots of optical access. Technically, you only need six to do laser cooling, but it’s always nice to be able to look at the atoms from other directions, and to be able to shine in additional laser beams to probe the atoms. The chamber that’s on there is probably overkill, but I wanted to be as flexible as possible.
I must pick a nit here (I must, I must), “Name That Tune” style. I can cool atoms with only four laser beam ports. Cool those atoms! Six beams, though, is more robust. A four-beam lattice is leaky.
If your four beams were tetrahedral they would cover all orthogonalities, yes?
(Your blog name now makes perfect sense!!!)
Hmm. This seems like a challenge. With the right mirrors and a retroreflector in your chamber, I’m sure you could cool atoms with only one laser beam “port”, although I’m not sure why one would want to.
Your 10^6 atom 4-beam lattice is nice.
Can you make a MOT with 4 beams? I assume that if you’re making a fountain for a clock you wouldn’t want the field coils (I couldn’t discern from your abstract), but I’m just curious.
I do believe a four-beam MOT has been made, though I don’t recall who did it.
We do collect in a MOT but of course turn off the field for launch; a molasses doesn’t collect enough atoms. We had done the four-beam test before we found an error in our estimate of how many atoms we would need to launch to get a good return signal. The four-beam system was very finicky and even small misalignments of the beams cost us a lot of atoms. Not a good situation for a device that’s going to need to run for an extended period of time.