Abstract
We report on an ion-optical system that serves as a microscope for ultracold ground state and Rydberg atoms. The system is designed to achieve a magnification of up to 1000 and a spatial resolution in the 100 nm range, thereby surpassing many standard imaging techniques for cold atoms. The microscope consists of four electrostatic lenses and a microchannel plate in conjunction with a delay line detector in order to achieve single particle sensitivity with high temporal and spatial resolution. We describe the design process of the microscope including ion-optical simulations of the imaging system and characterize aberrations and the resolution limit. Furthermore, we present the experimental realization of the microscope in a cold atom setup and investigate its performance by patterned ionization with a structure size down to 2.7 μm. The microscope meets the requirements for studying various many-body effects, ranging from correlations in cold quantum gases up to Rydberg molecule formation.
Highlights
The development of efficient laser cooling [1] paved the way to the production of ultracold atom clouds with temperatures down to several nanokelvin and to the experimental realization of Bose-Einstein condensates [2, 3] and degenerate Fermi gases [4]
With cold atoms loaded into a two dimensional optical lattice and a light-optical system with high numerical aperture placed close to the atom sample, a spatial resolution below 1 μm could be achieved with single atom and single site sensitivity [9, 10]
The detection of ions or electrons with high temporal and spatial resolution can be achieved with microchannel plates (MCP)
Summary
The development of efficient laser cooling [1] paved the way to the production of ultracold atom clouds with temperatures down to several nanokelvin and to the experimental realization of Bose-Einstein condensates [2, 3] and degenerate Fermi gases [4]. The detection of ions or electrons with high temporal and spatial resolution can be achieved with microchannel plates (MCP) Such detectors have been used to image cold electron or ion beams extracted out of a laser-cooled atom cloud [26,27,28,29,30]. A spatial resolution of 100 nm has been realized, using a scanning electron microscope for local ionization of cold atoms [34, 35] All these methods image a two-dimensional plane. In order to test the performance of the microscope, different optical ionization patterns are imprinted onto the MOT, with the generated ions being imaged by the electrostatic lens system
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