Electrostatic microtrap on the surface of the chip

Abstract

As is well known in atomic optics, the nonadiabatic transitions induce the loss of atoms trapped in a magnetic well which seriously affects the formation of the Bose-Einstein condensates. Electrostatic traps have widespread applications in molecular optics. While, for most existing electrostatic traps, the electric field strength in the trap center is nearly zero which may cause the nonadiabatic transitions. Especially for a chip-based microtrap, ingenious design is need to overcome this problem. In the paper, we propose a novel electrostatic microtrap composed of four arc-shaped electrodes. The influences of the voltages and the geometrical parameters of the electrodes on the electric field strength as well as the height of the potential well are studied. The distributions of electrostatic field are numerically calculated. We firstly simulate the trajectory of one molecule in the processes of loading and trapping. After that, we simulate the movements of a large number of molecules using the method of Monte Carlo. Then we calculate the temperature of trapped cold molecules. After that, we analyze the impacts of voltages and the geometrical parameters on the efficiency of our microtrap. At last, we show that our scheme can evolve into electrostatic microtrap arrays which should be a powerful tool for a variety of basic research and applications.