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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 28: Poster Quanteninformation
Q 28.24: Poster
Tuesday, March 11, 2008, 16:30–19:00, Poster C2
Photo-ionization studies of Calcium atoms — •Carsten Schuck, Marc Almendros, Felix Rohde, Francois Dubin, Markus Hennrich, and Jürgen Eschner — ICFO - Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, 08860 Castelldefels (Barcelona), Spain
We present a novel method for the efficient ionization of neutral Calcium atoms, which is used in our ion trap experiment. The atoms are resonantly excited from the ground state via the intermediate 4s4p 1P1 level close to the continuum, where they are ionized in the strong electric fields of the Paul trap [1]. For the first step a laser source at 423 nm is used while an incoherent source around 390 nm is sufficient for the second step [2]. We use a temperature-stabilized periodically poled KTiOPO4 crystal to create coherent 423 nm light in second harmonic generation from a 170 mW extended cavity diode laser in single pass [3]. A hollow cathode lamp is used to tune the laser to the 40Ca resonance. The 390 nm light is obtained from a high power indium gallium nitride LED, which emits approximately 85 mW of optical output power around its 380 nm peak wavelength. Using achromatic doublet lenses we focus the light from both sources into a multimode fiber and then image the fiber end to a 200 µm spot at the center of the trap, where they are overlapped with the atomic beam.
[1] S. Gulde, et al., Appl. Phys. B 73, 861 (2001),
[2] D.M. Lucas, et al., Phys. Rev. A 69, 012711 (2004),
[3] F. Torabi-Goudarzi, E. Riis, Opt. Comm. 227, 389 (2003).