Efficient Guiding of Cold Atoms though a Photonic Band Gap Fiber

TL;DR

This paper reports the first successful guiding of cold atoms through a photonic band gap fiber using a dipole trap, enabling new studies in light-matter interactions and matter wave interferometry.

Contribution

It demonstrates the first guiding of cold atoms through a photonic band gap fiber with sustained flux, opening avenues for 1D light-matter interaction studies.

Findings

Achieved guiding of cold atoms through a 88 mm photonic band gap fiber.

Sustained atomic flux of 1.5 x 10^4 atoms/sec for over 150 ms.

Observed a peak flux of over 10^5 atoms/sec at 1.5 m/s velocity.

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 mu m. We load the fiber from a dark spot 85-Rb magneto optical trap and observe a peak flux of more than 10^5 atoms/s at a velocity of 1.5 m/s. With an additional reservoir optical dipole trap, a constant atomic flux of 1.5 10^4 atoms/s 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.