Golovizin A, Tregubov D, Mishin D, Provorchenko D, Kolachevsky N
Opt Express. 2021 Oct 25;29(22):36734-36744. doi: 10.1364/OE.435105.
We have developed a compact vacuum system for laser cooling and spectroscopy of neutral thulium atoms. Compactness is achieved by obviating a classical Zeeman slower section and placing an atomic oven close to a magneto-optical trap (MOT), specifically at the distance of 11 cm. In this configuration, we significantly gained in solid angle of an atomic beam, which is affected by MOT laser beams, and reached 1 million atoms loaded directly in the MOT with only 15 mW of MOT cooling beams net power. By exploiting Zeeman-like deceleration of atoms with an additional laser beam and tailoring the MOT magnetic field gradient with a small magnetic coil, we demonstrated trapping of up to 13 million atoms. These results show great perspective of the developed setup for realizing a compact high-performance optical atomic clock based on thulium atoms.
我们开发了一种用于中性铥原子激光冷却和光谱学的紧凑型真空系统。通过省去传统的塞曼减速器部分并将原子炉放置在靠近磁光阱（MOT）的位置，具体距离为11厘米，实现了系统的紧凑性。在这种配置下，我们显著增加了受MOT激光束影响的原子束的立体角，并且仅用15毫瓦的MOT冷却光束净功率就直接在MOT中捕获了100万个原子。通过利用额外激光束对原子进行类塞曼减速，并使用小磁线圈调整MOT磁场梯度，我们展示了捕获多达1300万个原子的能力。这些结果表明，所开发的装置在基于铥原子实现紧凑型高性能光学原子钟方面具有很大的前景。
