Dresden 2011 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 57: Poster 3: Quantengase, Ultrakalte Atome, Ultrakalte Moleküle, Materiewellen Optik, Präzisionsmessungen, Metrologie

Q 57.60: Poster

Thursday, March 17, 2011, 16:30–19:30, P1

Manipulation of small atom clouds in a microscopic dipole trap — •Andreas Fuhrmanek, Ronan Bourgain, Yvan Sortais, Philippe Grangier, and Antoine Browaeys — Institut d'Optique, RD 128 Campus Polytechnique, 91127 Palaiseau Cedex, France

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the study of small, but dense cold atomic ensembles. Here we present our progress on the manipulation of cold atomic clouds in a regime where they contain only a few tens of atoms. In our case we use 87Rb atoms, trapped in a microscopic optical dipole trap, to study this mesoscopic regime. We use a single atom to measure the resolution of our imaging system. This method provides a calibration of our detection scheme which is useful to understand the regime where many atoms are trapped. We also implement an atom counting method that is capable of reconstructing the atom number distribution inside the dipole trap and allows a acurate measurement of the average atom number. With these techniques in hand we perform measurements on the dipole trap losses in the presence of near resonant light. The results help to understand the mechanisms of subpoissonian dipole trap loading and should be useful for the realisation of a BEC with a few atoms only.