Stand-alone vacuum cell for compact ultracold quantum technologies

Abstract

Compact ultra-high vacuum systems are key enabling components for cold atom technologies, facilitating extremely accurate sensing applications. There has been important progress towards a truly portable compact vacuum system, however size, weight and power consumption can be prohibitively large, optical access may be limited, and active pumping is often required. Here, we present a centilitre-scale ceramic vacuum chamber with He-impermeable viewports and an integrated diffractive optic, enabling robust laser cooling with light from a single polarization-maintaining fibre. A cold atom demonstrator based on the vacuum cell delivers 10 7 laser-cooled 87 Rb atoms per second, using minimal electrical power. With continuous Rb gas emission active pumping yields a 10 −7 mbar equilibrium pressure, and passive pumping stabilises to 3 × 10 −6 mbar, with a 17 day time constant. A passively-pumped vacuum cell, with no Rb dispensing, has currently kept a similar pressure for a year. The passive-pumping vacuum lifetime is several years, estimated from shortterm He throughput, with many foreseeable improvements. This technology enables wide-ranging mobilization of ultracold quantum metrology.

A simple imaging solution for chip-scale laser cooling

“…[8][9][10] Significant efforts have been made on the miniaturization of cold atom components to facilitate portability for next-generation atomic sensors. [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] However, the fabrication complexity of many of these components remains unfavorable for mass production, preventing their adoption in commercial applications.…”

“…1). The loading curves were used for the extraction of background pressure at the MOT location using the relation between MOT lifetime and background rubidium pressure, 11,26,27 while also checking the validity of the through-hole measured atom number. We note that the atom number measured from fluorescence imaging at this angle well matched the atom number extracted from conventional orthogonal fluorescence imaging.…”

A simple imaging solution for chip-scale laser cooling

“…While the transition to cold atoms offers clear advantages over thermal atom packages 7 , the additional experimental size and complexity associated with laser cooling has limited the deployability and application range of cold atom devices [8][9][10] . Significant efforts have been made on the miniaturisation of cold atom components to facilitate portability for next-generation atomic sensors [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] . However, the fabrication complexity of many of these components remains unfavourable for mass production, preventing their adoption in commercial applications.…”

“…1). The loading curves were used for the extraction of background pressure at the MOT location using the relation between MOT lifetime and background rubidium pressure 11,27,28 , while also checking the validity of the through-hole measured atom number. We note that the atom number measured from fluorescence imaging at this angle well matched the atom number extracted from conventional orthogonal fluorescence imaging.…”