Abstract
Background: Understanding the dynamics of ultracold quantum gases in an anharmonic potential is essential for applications in the new field of cold-atom scanning probe microscopy. Therein, cold atomic ensembles are used as sensitive probe tips to investigate nanostructured surfaces and surface-near potentials, which typically cause anharmonic tip motion.Results: Besides a theoretical description of this anharmonic tip motion, we introduce a novel method for detecting the cold-atom tip dynamics in situ and real time. In agreement with theory, the first measurements show that particle interactions and anharmonic motion have a significant impact on the tip dynamics.Conclusion: Our findings will be crucial for the realization of high-sensitivity force spectroscopy with cold-atom tips and could possibly allow for the development of advanced spectroscopic techniques such as Q-control.
Highlights
The development of novel scanning probe techniques has lead to tremendous improvements in investigating nanomaterials [1]
Ultracold atoms have been used for studying multiple many-body effects, ranging from Mott-insulator transitions [12] to Feshbach [13] and Efimov [14] resonances. Preparing and manipulating these quantum gases in the direct vicinity of micro- and nanostructured surfaces [15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22] paved the way to cold-atom surface probing [23,24,25,26,27,28] and allowed for the realization of cold-atom scanning probe microscopy [29,30,31]
We show that collisions between particles and the anharmonicity of the potential will have a strong influence on the overall tip dynamics
Summary
Besides a theoretical description of this anharmonic tip motion, we introduce a novel method for detecting the cold-atom tip dynamics in situ and real time. The first measurements show that particle interactions and anharmonic motion have a significant impact on the tip dynamics
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