Light-induced evaporative cooling in a magneto-optical trap

This paper presents an experimental demonstration of light-induced evaporative cooling in a magneto-optical trap. An additional laser is used to interact with atoms at the edge of the atomic cloud in the trap. These atoms get an additional force and evaporated away from the trap by both the magnetic field and laser fields. There remaining atoms have lower kinetic energy and thus are cooled. It reports the measurements on the temperature and atomic number after the evaporative cooling with different parameters including the distance between the laser and the centre of the atomic cloud, the detuning, the intensity. The results show that the light-induced evaporative cooling is a way to generate an ultra-cold atom source.

Laser cooling of rubidium atoms from background vapor in diffuse light

In this paper we describe an experiment on laser cooling of Rb-87 atoms directly from a vapor background in diffuse light. Diffuse light is produced in a ceramic integrating sphere by multiple scattering of two laser beams injected through multimode fibers. A probe beam, whose propagation direction is either horizontal or vertical, is used to detect cold atoms. We measured the absorption spectra of the cold atoms by scanning the frequency of the probe beam, and observed both the absorption signal and the time of flight signal after we switched off the cooling light, from which we estimated the temperature and the number of cold atoms. This method is clearly attractive for building a compact cold atom clock.

Optomechanical Inertial Sensors and Feedback Cooling

The optomechanical interaction is an extremely powerful tool with which to measure mechanical motion. The displacement resolution of chip-scale optomechanical systems has been measured on the order of 1⁄10th of a proton radius. So strong is this optomechanical interaction that it has recently been used to remove almost all thermal noise from a mechanical resonator and observe its quantum ground-state of motion starting from cryogenic temperatures.

In this work, chapter 1 describes the basic physics of the canonical optomechanical system, optical measurement techniques, and how the optomechanical interaction affects the coupled mechanical resonator. In chapter 2, we describe our techniques for realizing this canonical optomechanical system in a chip-scale form factor.

In chapter 3, we describe an experiment where we used radiation pressure feedback to cool a mesoscopic mechanical resonator near its quantum ground-state from room-temperature. We cooled the resonator from a room temperature phonon occupation of <n> = 6.5 million to an occupation of <n> = 66, which means the resonator is in its ground state approximately 2% of the time, while being coupled to a room-temperature thermal environment. At the time of this work, this is the closest a mesoscopic mechanical resonator has been to its ground-state of motion at room temperature, and this work begins to open the door to room-temperature quantum control of mechanical objects.

Chapter 4 begins with the realization that the displacement resolutions achieved by optomechanical systems can surpass those of conventional MEMS sensors by an order of magnitude or more. This provides the motivation to develop and calibrate an optomechanical accelerometer with a resolution of approximately 10 micro-g/rt-Hz over a bandwidth of approximately 30 kHz. In chapter 5, we improve upon the performance and practicality of this sensor by greatly increasing the test mass size, investigating and reducing low-frequency noise, and incorporating more robust optical coupling techniques and capacitive wavelength tuning. Finally, in chapter 6 we present our progress towards developing another optomechanical inertial sensor - a gyroscope.