Stand-alone vacuum cell for compact ultracold quantum technologies

Oliver S Burrow,Edward Boughton,Francesco Mirando,Paul F Griffin,Paul F Osborn,Erling Riis,David P Burt,Aidan S Arnold

doi:10.1063/5.0061010

Abstract

Compact vacuum systems are key enabling components for cold atom technologies, facilitating extremely accurate sensing applications. There has been important progress toward a truly portable compact vacuum system; however, size, weight, and power consumption can be prohibitively large, optical access may be limited, and active pumping is often required. Here, we present a centiliter-scale ceramic vacuum chamber with He-impermeable viewports and an integrated diffractive optic, enabling robust laser cooling with light from a single polarization-maintaining fiber. A cold atom demonstrator based on the vacuum cell delivers 107 laser-cooled 87Rb atoms per second, using minimal electrical power. With continuous Rb gas emission, active pumping yields a 10−7 mbar equilibrium pressure, and passive pumping stabilizes to 3×10−6 mbar with a 17 day time constant. A vacuum cell, with no Rb dispensing and only passive pumping, has currently kept a similar pressure for more than 500 days. The passive-pumping vacuum lifetime is several years, which is estimated from short-term He throughput with many foreseeable improvements. This technology enables wide-ranging mobilization of ultracold quantum metrology.

Highlights

The ability to laser cool atoms yields orders of magnitude longer interrogation times than with room temperature atoms for equivalent volume devices, enabling measurements with unprecedented accuracy[1,2,3]
While key progress has been made in developing miniaturised vacuum systems for ‘hot’ ions[22,23] and laser-cooled atoms[24–28], a chamber should ideally be devoid of any challenging bulky components or appendages, with integrated pump and atom source, enabling suitable vacuum in an apparatus with a truly compact form factor
We present a cubic high vacuum chamber, with 32 mm sides, and an integrated diffraction grating for magneto-optical trapping of atoms with a single input laser beam: a grating magneto-optical traps (MOTs) vacuum cell (Fig. 1 a)

Summary

Introduction

The ability to laser cool atoms yields orders of magnitude longer interrogation times than with room temperature atoms for equivalent volume devices, enabling measurements with unprecedented accuracy[1,2,3]. Quantum cold atom sensors use magneto-optical traps (MOTs)[10,11,12] comprising laser-cooling sub-systems of: lasers, magnetic coils, optics, and sufficient vacuum. We present a cubic high vacuum chamber, with 32 mm sides, and an integrated diffraction grating for magneto-optical trapping of atoms with a single input laser beam: a grating MOT (gMOT31–33) vacuum cell (Fig. 1 a).

Results

Conclusion