Design and fabrication of diffractive atom chips for laser cooling and trapping

TL;DR

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and optical characterization of diffractive gratings integrated into atom chips, enabling efficient laser cooling and trapping of atoms for quantum technologies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for micro-fabricating optical gratings directly on atom chips and analyzes their optical properties for cold atom applications.

Findings

Gratings effectively diffract laser beams for atom trapping

Fabrication process produces high-quality optical gratings

Scalar diffraction theory explains grating performance

Abstract

It has recently been shown that optical reflection gratings fabricated directly into an atom chip provide a simple and effective way to trap and cool substantial clouds of atoms [1,2]. In this article we describe how the gratings are designed and micro-fabricated and we characterise their optical properties, which determine their effectiveness as a cold atom source. We use simple scalar diffraction theory to understand how the morphology of the gratings determines the power in the diffracted beams.