Related papers: Grey-molasses optical-tweezer loading: Controlling…
Optical tweezers are a powerful tool for the precise positioning of a variety of small objects, including single neutral atoms. Once trapped, atoms can be cooled to the motional ground state of the tweezers. For a more advanced control of…
Since their invention in the 1980s [1], optical tweezers have found a wide range of applications, from biophotonics and mechanobiology to microscopy and optomechanics [2, 3, 4, 5]. Simulations of the motion of microscopic particles held by…
A spatial light modulator (SLM) and a pair of galvanometer-mounted mirrors (GMM) were combined into an optical tweezers set-up. This provides great flexibility as the SLM creates an array of traps which can be moved smoothly and quickly…
Direct laser cooling of molecules has reached a phase space density exceeding 10$^{-6}$ in optical traps, but with rather small molecular numbers. To progress towards quantum degeneracy, a mechanism is needed that combines sub-Doppler…
We study the dynamics of atoms in optical traps when exposed to laser cooling light that induces light-assisted collisions. We experimentally prepare individual atom pairs and observe their evolution. Due to the simplicity of the system…
We demonstrate the direct loading of a D$_2$ MOT of potassium-39 atoms from a cryogenic buffer gas beam source. We load $10^8$ atoms in a 10 ms pulse, with no degradation in performance up to a 10 Hz repetition rate. Observed densities…
We propose a method for separating trapped atoms in optical lattices by large distances. The key idea is the cyclic transfer of atoms between two lattices of variable spacing, known as accordion lattices, each covering at least a factor of…
Surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is optically sensitive and chemically specific to detect single molecule spectroscopic signatures. Facilitating this capability in optically-trapped nanoparticles at low laser power remains a…
We present a method for determining the atom number distribution of few atoms in a tight optical tweezer from their fluorescence distributions. In the tight tweezer regime, the detection light causes rapid atom loss due to light-assisted…
We trap cold, ground-state, argon atoms in a deep optical dipole trap produced by a build-up cavity. The atoms, which are a general source for the sympathetic cooling of molecules, are loaded in the trap by quenching them from a cloud of…
Optical tweezers exploit light--matter interactions to trap particles ranging from single atoms to micrometer-sized eukaryotic cells. For this reason, optical tweezers are a ubiquitous tool in physics, biology, and nanotechnology. Recently,…
We use a gray molasses operating on the D$_1$ atomic transition to produce degenerate quantum gases of $^{6}$Li with a large number of atoms. This sub-Doppler cooling phase allows us to lower the initial temperature of 10$^9$ atoms from 500…
We report on the efficient gray molasses cooling of sodium atoms using the $D_{2}$ optical transition at 589.1 nm. Thanks to the hyperfine split about 6$\Gamma$ between the $|F'=2\rangle$ and $|F'=3\rangle$ in the excited state…
Arrays of optical tweezers form the backbone of neutral atoms analog and digital quantum processors. However, the inter-trap distance remains generally much larger than the size of the tweezers to avoid interference-induced trap…
The optical tweezer experiment with neutral atoms is a focal topic in cold atom physics due to its significant potential in quantum computing and simulation. Here, we present the realization of a dual-species optical tweezer for both Rb and…
We have studied a general technique for laser cooling a cloud of polarized trapped atoms down to the Doppler temperature. A one-dimensional optical molasses using polarized light cools the axial motional degree of freedom of the atoms in…
Magneto-optical traps are central to atomic and molecular quantum technologies and precision tests of fundamental physics, where both sensitivity and bandwidth scale strongly with atom number and loading rate. We demonstrate that employing…
We describe an approach to optically trapping small, chemically stable molecules at cryogenic temperatures by buffer-gas loading a deep optical dipole trap. The ~10 K trap depth will be produced by a tightly-focused, 1064-nm cavity capable…
We demonstrate trapping of individual rubidium (Rb) and cesium (Cs) atoms in an interleaved array of bright tweezers and dark bottle-beam traps, using a microfabricated optical element illuminated by a single laser beam and a 4F system with…
The preparation of large, low-entropy, highly coherent ensembles of identical quantum systems is foundational for many studies in quantum metrology, simulation, and information. Here, we realize these features by leveraging the favorable…