A tunable doughnut laser beam for cold-atom experiments

Abstract

A doughnut-shaped light beam has been generated from a Gaussian mode (TEM00). Upon splitting the pump beam into two equal-intensity components and introducing unequal convergences with a phase delay while they are recombined, a doughnut mode results. The output beam is tunable and has a long propagation length. The evanescent field generated by a 360 mW (at 780 nm wavelength) beam creates an optical field of 600 nm decay length with a 5.75 neV repulsive dipole potential. Thus cold Rb atoms (at a temperature of 10 μK or less) released from a magneto-optical trap can be reflected by the funnel surface, with the result that the atoms are ultimately collected at the bottom.