Additive manufacturing of magnetic shielding and ultra-high vacuum flange for cold atom sensors

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the use of laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing to produce magnetic shielding and vacuum chambers for cold atom sensors, showing promising results for miniaturizing quantum devices.

Contribution

It introduces additive manufacturing for critical quantum sensor components, achieving near-conventional shielding and ultra-high vacuum performance with 3D-printed titanium parts.

Findings

Magnetic shields achieved within a factor of 3 of conventional shielding.

Vacuum chambers reached pressures of 5 ± 0.5 × 10^{-10} mbar.

Additive manufacturing shows promise for compact quantum sensor design.

Abstract

Recent advances in the understanding and control of quantum technologies, such as those based on cold atoms, have resulted in devices with extraordinary metrological sensitivities. To realise this potential outside of a lab environment the size, weight and power consumption need to be reduced. Here we demonstrate the use of laser powder bed fusion, an additive manufacturing technique, as a production technique for the components that make up quantum sensors. As a demonstration we have constructed two key components using additive manufacturing, namely magnetic shielding and vacuum chambers. The initial prototypes for magnetic shields show shielding factors within a factor of 3 of conventional approaches. The vacuum demonstrator device shows that 3D-printed titanium structures are suitable for use as vacuum chambers, with the test system reaching base pressures of $5 \pm 0.5 \times 10^{-10}$ mbar. These demonstrations show considerable promise for the use of additive manufacturing for cold atom based quantum technologies, in future enabling improved integrated structures, allowing for the reduction in size, weight and assembly complexity.