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 Physics at Virginia

"Dynamic holographic beam shaping for cold atom manipulation"


Vincent Carrat , University of Virginia
[Host: Tom Gallagher]
ABSTRACT:
Dynamic holography using a spatial light modulator is a very versatile tool for creating arbitrary optical potentials by spatially shaping a laser beam. These potentials can be used for cold atoms manipulation. In order to produce accurate optical potentials by shaping a laser beam we need high quality holograms. Nevertheless SLMs suffer from defects which limit the quality. To measure defects we have developed a method based on polarimetry to get the birefringence map of the SLM. Birefringence mapping is suitable to monitor the hologram without disturbing the on-going experiment. It's an in-situ measurement. After the measurement, defects are corrected by a feedback on the input hologram.

As a demonstration, we used our SLM to produce Laguerre-Gaussian beams in order to guide over a long distance a cold rubidium beam supplied by a 2D-MOT. We have strongly reduced the divergence of this source and thus increasing by a factor of 200 the atomic density after a propagation of 30 cm. Furthermore we showed that in such a guide the spontaneous emission is lower than in the usual red detuned gaussian guide case.

Atomic Physics Seminar
Monday, October 14, 2013
3:30 PM
Physics Building, Room 204
Note special room.

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