Multiple-camera defocus imaging of ultracold atomic gases

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-camera defocused imaging technique for ultracold atomic gases that improves image accuracy by eliminating artifacts associated with traditional defocused imaging methods.

Contribution

The authors extend off-resonance defocused imaging to multiple cameras, removing the need for regularization and reducing artifacts in ultracold atom imaging.

Findings

MORD imaging achieves competitive accuracy with absorption and phase contrast methods.

The technique can be integrated into existing setups with minimal additional equipment.

Experimental results demonstrate effective imaging of Bose-Einstein condensates.

Abstract

In cold atom experiments, each image of light refracted and absorbed by an atomic ensemble carries a remarkable amount of information. Numerous imaging techniques including absorption, fluorescence, and phase-contrast are commonly used. Other techniques such as off-resonance defocused imaging (ORDI), where an in-focus image is deconvolved from a defocused image, have been demonstrated but find only niche applications. The ORDI inversion process introduces systematic artifacts because it relies on regularization to account for missing information at some spatial frequencies. In the present work, we extend ORDI to use multiple cameras simultaneously at degrees of defocus, eliminating the need for regularization and its attendant artifacts. We demonstrate this technique by imaging Bose-Einstein condensates, and show that the statistical uncertainties in the measured column density using the multiple-camera off-resonance defocused (MORD) imaging method are competitive with absorption imaging near resonance and phase contrast imaging far from resonance. Experimentally, the MORD method may be incorporated into existing set-ups with minimal additional equipment.