Abstract
We demonstrate the first guiding of cold atoms through a 88 mm long piece of photonic band gap fiber. The guiding potential is created by a far-off resonance dipole trap propagating inside the fiber with a hollow core of 12 μm. We load the fiber from a dark spot 85Rb magneto-optical trap and observe a peak flux of more than 105 atoms s−1 at a velocity of 1.5 m s−1. With an additional reservoir optical dipole trap, a constant atomic flux of 1.5 × 104 atoms s−1 is sustained for more than 150 ms. These results open up interesting possibilities to study nonlinear light–matter interaction in a nearly one-dimensional geometry and pave the way for guided matter wave interferometry.
Highlights
The generation of Bose-Einstein condensates [1, 2] has equipped modern atomic physics with an extremely versatile tool to study coherent atomic matter waves
Severe losses of the confining light, speckle patterns and multimode performance limited the useful guiding length. These shortcomings can be overcome by exploiting the specific features of the recently developed hollow-core photonic band gap (HCPBG) fibers which do not suffer from bending losses and speckle [21]
Thermal atoms have been guided through [24] and cold atoms have been moved into [25] a HCPBG fiber
Summary
The generation of Bose-Einstein condensates [1, 2] has equipped modern atomic physics with an extremely versatile tool to study coherent atomic matter waves. To an optical fiber, an ideal matter waveguide can be used to transport a single spatial mode of a coherent matter wave source, enabling matter wave interferometry [9, 10, 11, 12] over large distances To this end, cold atoms need to be transported in a lossless, tightly confining potential in order to preserve the coherence properties of the matter wave. Severe losses of the confining light, speckle patterns and multimode performance limited the useful guiding length These shortcomings can be overcome by exploiting the specific features of the recently developed hollow-core photonic band gap (HCPBG) fibers which do not suffer from bending losses and speckle [21]. We report on the first observation of an efficient matter waveguide for cold, slow atoms
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