Qu Qiu-Zhi

Laser Cooling of 87Rb to 1.5 μK in a Fountain Clock

We report an experiment on the adiabatic cooling of 87Rb atoms in an atomic fountain to a temperature as low as 1.5 μK, which is roughly twice the recoil temperature. The atomic fountain has the (1,1,1) optical geometry for cooling and launching of cold atoms. The atoms are first cooled in an optical molasses of 6 beams to 3.4 μK by polarization gradient geometry and then are adiabatically cooled by decreasing the intensity of laser from 1.8Is per beam to zero in 1 ms during the launching of cold atoms. We also study the dependences of atomic temperature on different laser parameters. The method we used is useful in any cold atom physics experiment.

Improvement on Temperature Measurement of Cold Atoms in a Rubidium Fountain

The time-of-flight (TOF) method is one of the most common ways to measure the temperature of cold atoms. In the cold atomic fountain setup, the geometry of the probe beam will introduce the measurement errors to the spatial distribution of cold atomic cloud, which will lead to the measurement errors on atomic temperature. Using deconvolution, we recover the atomic cloud profile from the TOF signal. Then, we use the recovered signals other than the TOF signals to obtain a more accurate atomic temperature. This will be important in estimating the effects of cold atom collision shift and the shift due to transverse cavity phase distribution on an atomic fountain clock.

Surface Planar Ion Chip for Linear Radio-Frequency Paul Traps

We propose a surface planar ion chip which forms a linear radio frequency Paul ion trap. The electrodes reside in the two planes of a chip, and the trap axis is located above the chip surface. Its electric field and potential distribution are similar to the standard linear radio frequency Paul ion trap. This ion trap geometry may be greatly meaningful for quantum information processing.

Coherent Scattering of Light by Bose–Einstein Condensation in a Tight Confinement

We have observed strong scattering of a probe light by dilute Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) Rb-87 gas in a tight magnetic trap. The scattering light forms fringes at the image plane. It is found that we can infer the real size of the condensation and the number of the atoms by modelling the imaging system. We present a quantitative calculation of light scattering by the condensed atoms. The calculation shows that the experimental results agree well with the prediction of the generalized diffraction theory, and thus we can directly observe the phase transition of BEC in a tight trap.