University of Nottingham
  

Chip based light-atom interface                                 The University of Nottingham

 

The ESR will integrate a hollow-core photonic crystal fibre into an Chipbasedatom chip environment.Using established techniques, ensembles of laser cooled atoms will be magnetically trapped, evaporatively cooled, and guided into the surface mounted fibre with micro fabricated, current carrying structures. The ESR will then explore new regimes of light-atom interaction as the atoms are expected to exhibit long coherence times, and strong coupling between the ensemble and the light fields can be achieved at very low atom and photon numbers. This system will form a basis for extreme and long lived spin-squeezing, which has the potential to significantly enhance the resolution of field sensors by overcoming the standard quantum limit of uncorrelated atoms. The setup will combine two state-of-the-art technologies, atom chips and photonic crystal fibres. The ESR will strongly benefit from links to several other projects. He/she will receive input from new fibre designs and in-fibre cooling and in turn provide insights into atom guiding and interactions between atoms and the photonic crystal structure through Casimir-Polder forces.

QTea coordination:

School of Physics & Astronomy, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
Email: thomas.fernholz@nottingham.ac.uk