Experimental demonstration of painting arbitrary and dynamic potentials for Bose-Einstein condensates

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a method to create dynamic, arbitrary, and stable optical potentials for Bose-Einstein condensates using a rapidly-moving laser beam that 'paints' the desired trapping geometries, enabling complex manipulations.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel laser painting technique to generate versatile and stable optical potentials for BECs, allowing arbitrary and dynamic trap geometries with minimal heating.

Findings

Successfully created various BEC geometries including toroids and lattices.

Confirmed condensate nature through matter wave interference patterns.

Demonstrated dynamic transformation between different trap configurations.

Abstract

There is a pressing need for robust and straightforward methods to create potentials for trapping Bose-Einstein condensates which are simultaneously dynamic, fully arbitrary, and sufficiently stable to not heat the ultracold gas. We show here how to accomplish these goals, using a rapidly-moving laser beam that "paints" a time-averaged optical dipole potential in which we create BECs in a variety of geometries, including toroids, ring lattices, and square lattices. Matter wave interference patterns confirm that the trapped gas is a condensate. As a simple illustration of dynamics, we show that the technique can transform a toroidal condensate into a ring lattice and back into a toroid. The technique is general and should work with any sufficiently polarizable low-energy particles.