Atomic Dipole Traps with Amplified Spontaneous Emission: A Proposal

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel low-coherence optical source based on Erbium ASE for ultra-cold atom traps, enabling incoherent superposition of multiple beams to simplify complex trapping configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a new ASE-based optical source with low coherence for improved atomic trapping, reducing interference issues in complex optical setups.

Findings

Estimated intensity noise is suitable for cold atom experiments.

Atomic excess heating rate is acceptable for evaporative cooling.

Source effectively enables incoherent superposition of trapping beams.

Abstract

We propose what we believe to be a novel type of optical source for ultra-cold atomic Far Off-Resonance optical-dipole Traps (FORTs). The source is based on an Erbium Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) source that seeds a high power Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA). The main interest of this source is its very low coherence length, thus allowing an incoherent superposition of several trapping beams without any optical interference. The behavior of the superimposed beams is then a scalar sum greatly simplifying complex configurations. As an illustration, we report an estimation of the intensity noise of this source and an estimation of the atomic excess heating rate for an evaporative cooling experiment application. They are both found to be suitable for cold atoms experiments.