Quantum-State-Selective Mirror Reflection of Atoms by Laser Light

Abstract

We have demonstrated the specular reflection of Na atoms at a nonuniform laser field, the reflection coefficient of the "atomic mirror" being close to 100%. A specific feature of the reflection process is its quantum-state-selective character. The experimentally measured reflection selectivity (the ratio between the reflection coefficients of the sodium atoms in the ground-state sublevels with F = 2 and F -\) was around 100.

Physics with coherent matter waves

“…The reflection of atoms with relatively high kinetic energy has been demonstrated using steep potentials realised with evanescent waves [282,283,284,285,286,287] and periodic magnetic surfaces [288,289,290,291,292,293,294,295,296,297,298]. These elements however critically depend on their surface roughness, which often hinders a purely specular reflection.…”

Manipulating Beams of Ultra-cold Atoms with a Static Magnetic Field

“…Important in such applications of laser-cooled atoms is the development of atomic-optical elements, such as mirrors, beamsplitters and recombiners. Considerable progress has been made in developing mirrors and beamsplitters using optical electromagnetic fields, both as free-running laser beams (Martin et al 1988;Riehle et al 1991) and as evanescent fields (Cook and Hill 1982;Balykin et al 1988;Hajnal and Opat 1989). A potentially simpler way of manipulating atoms with the electromagnetic force is to use the interaction between static inhomogeneous magnetic fields and the atomic magnetic dipole moment (Opat et al 1992).…”

Diffuse reflection of a Bose–Einstein condensate from a rough evanescent wave mirror

“…A measurement of the reflection threshold for the atom beam, taking into account the van der Waals attraction toward the surface (Landragin et al in Ref. [6]), gives access to the light intensity at the surface in the spot center: I 0 = 210 W/cm 2 . This value is lower than expected from the design of the dielectric coating; we attribute this to the losses due to the roughness of the deposited TiO 2 layer (see Figure 5 below and the discussion there).…”

“…They have the advantage of a strong suppression of the spin flip loss mechanism compared to metallic structures [5]. With such a system, one can realize mirrors [6], diffraction gratings [7], 2D traps [8] or waveguides [9]. Experiments involving ultra cold atoms from a BEC at the vicinity of a dielectric surface have recently made significant progress, leading for instance to the realization of a two dimensional BEC [10], to the study of atom-surface reflection in the quantum regime [11], and to sensitive measurements of adsorbate-induced surface polarization [12] and of the Van der Waals/Casimir-Polder surface interaction [13].…”