A controllable longitudinal double-well optical dipole trap for cold atoms (or cold molecules)

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to produce a longitudinal controllable double-well optical dipole trap for cold atoms (or cold molecules), which is composed of a binary π-phase plate and a lens. The π-phase plate consists of two homocentric rings with equal area and opposite phase (0 and π), and its central region is opaque. When a plane light wave passes through the above optical system, a double-well optical trap will be formed at two sides of the focal point along the optical axis. The outer radius of the binary π-phase plate can be controlled by adjusting the radius of a diaphragm, so that a double-well optical trap will evolve and finally combined into a single-well, or vice versa. We briefly introduce the basic principle and derive several optimal parameters of the trap, and show the dependence of the optical parameters (including intensity distributions) on the geometrical parameters of the system. Our study shows that the proposed controllable optical trap can be used not only to trap cold atoms (or cold molecules) and realize all-optical, double-well or two species Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), but also to study the trapped-atom (-molecule) interference, or form a 2D array of double-layer optical traps for cold atoms (or molecules), even to prepare a novel 2D optical lattice, and so on.