ADDITIONAL REPORT

Tien Tran Duy

Contents
1. Magnetic trapping of neutral atoms ............................................................................................... 2
2. Experiment procedure .................................................................................................................... 3
3. General direction ............................................................................................................................ 4
4. Future plan ...................................................................................................................................... 7
5. References ...................................................................................................................................... 9
1. Magnetic trapping of neutral atoms
Generally, the magnetic trapping of neutral atoms is based on the Zeeman effect. In a non-
uniform magnetic field, the energy of an atom will change depending on the interaction of the
magnetic moment of the atom with the magnetic field.
The potential energy of an atom in a magnetic field is given by:

U ( x, y, z ) .B mF g F B B( x, y, z )

where is the magnetic moment of the atom, (x,y,z) is the position of the atom in the
magnetic field, mF is the magnetic quantum number and g F is the Lande g factor.

If 0 , the atom experiences a driving force toward the higher magnetic field regions
(high-field seeking state) and vice versa (low-field seeking state). This force was named the
Stern-Gerlach force:

F ( x, y, z ) mF g F B B( x, y, z )

Thus, for a magnetic trap, it is required to produce either a magnetic field minimum or
maximum point. However, since it is not possible to create a local magnetic field maximum
in free space, it is required to have a local minimum to trap weak-field seeking state atoms.
This can be done with a configuration consisting of two parallel anti-Helmholtz coils which
creates a quadrupole trap with a zero-field minimum.
For stable trapping, it is required that the kinetic energy of the trapped atom is lower than the
trap depth and that the trapped atom remains in the same quantum state relative to the
direction of the magnetic field. An atom can experience a Majorana spin flip which changes
d
the atom from a weak-field seeking state to a high field seeking state if the rate of change
dt
of the field direction with respect to the moving atom is larger than its Larmor precessional
frequency (the rate at which the magnetic moment of an atom precesses around the magnetic
field) given by:
m g B ( x, y , z )
L F F B

This is the main drawback of the quadrupole trap with a zero-field minimum which can
induce flip losses. One way to counteract this problem is to introduce a Ioffe-Pritchard trap.
This trap contains four current carrying bars and two pinch coils. The 2D quadrupole field
created by the bars and the non-uniform field created by the coils can produce a 3D trap with
a magnetic field minimum B0 .

According to Sukumar and Brink [1], in the high temperature limit kBT 2 a cloud of
spin-half trapped atoms with a thermal Boltzmann distribution at temperature T have a spin
flip transition rate:

2 E
exp 0
kBT k BT
where is the oscillator frequency for negligible axial confinement.
In our experimental setup, the trapping potential is created by using a DC current carrying
wire on an atom chip and a constant homogeneous bias field, which produces a total magnetic
field:

B Bwire Bb

This is a 2D quadrupole field with a zero-field minimum at a distance r0 from the wire as the
magnetic field from the wire is cancelled by the bias magnetic field:

I
r0 0
2 Bb
The gradient of the field is given by:

B I
0 2
r 2 r
In order to prevent spin flip losses, a constant magnetic field is applied to increase the trap
minimum to a value B0 which consequently changes the potential from linear to harmonic.
The radial oscillation frequency of a trapped atom in a harmonic potential is given by:

2 Bb2 mF g F B

0 I mB0

In order to create a 3D trap, closing the ends of a wire trap needs to be done by bending the
wire into a U-wire shape (quadrupole trap) or a Z-shape (Ioffe-Pritchard trap). In the U-wire
case, the middle segment of the U-wire creates a trapping potential similar to the case of a
straight wire while the end segments provide additional confinement in the third direction.
Since the currents in the two segments are in opposite directions, the field components cancel
each other and create a zero-field minimum in the centre of the trap. The nature of this field is
used to create a magnetic-optical trap near a reflecting surface without the aid of external
coils (Compressed MOT or CMOT). For the Z-wire case, since the currents in two end
segments are in the same direction, no zero-field minimum is created. The field strength at
the minimum can be controlled by the strength of a uniform bias field.

2. Experiment procedure
In our experiment, the first stage involves cooling and trapping Rb in a mirror magneto-
optical trap by using a reflectiing surface of the chip to create 4 trapping laser beams, 2
beams parallel and 2 beams formed at 450 to the chip surface. Considering atoms experience
two counter-propagating laser beams with the same intensity and frequency, when an atom
absorbs a photon, it will receive a momentum and be slowed down by k / m . After that, the
atom will emit a photon in a random direction to return to the ground state. For a symmetric
average distribution, the total change in momentum is zero.
Our trapping laser is red-detuned 14 MHz below the F=2 to F=3 hyperfine transition. An
atom moving to the right will see laser beams in the opposite direction as a change toward the
atomic resonance frequency by the Doppler effect. Therefore, this atom will absorb more
photons from the opposing laser beam and be slowed down. It is similar for an atom moving
to the left. This procedure repeats many times and, as a result, atoms will be slowed down
and cooled to a temperature close to Doppler limit, which is of the order of a few hundred
K . The Doppler limit comes from the fact that, in each scattering cycle, an atom extracts an
amount of energy from the laser which is a source of heating given by:

E 2 r

where r is the single-photon recoil energy.

As the cooling and the heating rate are in equilibrium, the lowest temperature that can be
achieved at / 2 is:

TD
2k B

where is the laser detuning and is the decay rate.

Afterwards, a CMOT stage follows which brings the atoms close to the chip surface. The
main purpose of the CMOT is to increase the transfer efficiency of trapped atoms to the Z-
wire trap. After the CMOT stage, a PGC (polarisation gradient cooling) stage, in which the
trapping laser detuning is ramped up from 45 MHz to 50 MHz while keeping the U-wire
current the same, is needed since the temperature of the atom cloud increases as it is being
compressed. After around 20 ms of PGC, the temperature of the cloud is as low as 30 K . In
the next stage, the optical pumping stage, the atoms are pumped into the required trapped
state. This stage helps increase the number of trapped atoms around 5 times. Next, the atom
cloud is transferred to the Z-wire trap located 600 m below the chip surface. After that, a
preliminary RF evaporative cooling is done to reduce the temperature to 10 15 K which
helps to gain a higher phase space density of the cloud. Then the atom cloud is merged into
the magnetic lattice trap which is located around 8 m below the chip surface for the case of
our 10 m -period 1D magnetic lattice. Finally, a second RF evaporative cooling is done to
cool the atoms to even lower temperatures, around 0.5 K , for degeneracy.

3. General direction
The new sub-micron period lattice film glued on the new DBC atom chip has recently been
mounted in the UHV chamber for experiments. This atom chip is intended to allow a range of
new quantum tunnelling experiments, such as the superfluid to Mott insulator quantum phase
transition, in a magnetic lattice. To perform quantum tunnelling experiments in sub-micron
period magnetic lattices, the experimental setup needs to be upgraded:
1. Background magnetic field and magnetic field noise will need to be reduced as
much as possible, preferably to < 1 mG. From our simulation results, it is expected that the
quantum phase transition will be reached by slowly increasing the trap depth to around 20
mG for 2D lattices, which is very small. Therefore, controlling the magnetic noise to less than
1 mG would be beneficial for this experiment.
In our experiment setup, the AC magnetic noise is a problem, which mainly comes from
nearby power supplies. The dominant noise measured is from 50 Hz and its higher harmonic
frequencies. During RF spectra measurements, we realized that the width of the measured RF
spectra is quite sensitive to this noise. The reason might be traced back to the phase
fluctuation of the 50 Hz AC line while we were applying the RF pulse in the RF spectra
measurements. The fluctuations cause a phase difference with the RF pulse triggering which
can alter the trap bottom and consequently lead to broadening of the RF spectra.
This problem can be simply counteracted by building a LINE trigger circuit so that it would
make sure the RF pulse would be triggered at an unchanged specific phase compared to the
AC noise. For this reason, we have employed a 50 Hz AC line trigger circuit designed by
RICE University. Generally, the circuit acts as a good clock and produces TTL pulses, which
will trigger the RF pulse generator at zero-crossing of the AC power line. With this circuit,
the RF pulse is locked to a well-defined phase of the AC line until being triggered by the
circuit which consequently makes the measurement more stable. Also, our group members
including Ivan Herrera, Alessandro Brolis and Yibo Wang have built an active stray magnetic
field cancellation system consisting of a fluxgate sensor for low frequency noise lower than
15 Hz and a pick-up coil for high frequency noise. The feedback loop has helped to reduce
the magnetic noise by around 5 times.

Figure 1: LINE triggering circuit diagraph [2].

Figure 2: The signal from oscilloscope before (a) and after (b) using LINE triggering circuit. The blue signal is from the
control program (a) and corresponds to the signal from the LINE circuit (b). The yellow signal is from the RF pulse
generator (a) and corresponds to the signal from the trigger circuit (b) [3].

Figure 3: Active stray magnetic field cancellation feedback loop [4].

Figure 4: The magnetic noise before (a) and after (b) using feedback loop [5].
 2. Since we will trap atoms in very tight magnetic lattice traps, on a sub-micron scale,
smooth and periodic magnetic potentials are necessary in order to avoid any fragmentation of
elongated atom clouds where cold atoms are not continuously trapped. As a result of
fragmentations, elastic collisions among the trapped atoms would not occur properly during
the RF cooling, which might be the reason for the large RF spectra linewidth. In this case, a
new imaging system which images the atom cloud from below the chip will be useful to
detect any fragmentation of the atom cloud trapped on the 1D magnetic lattice. Having a
perpendicular view from underneath of the chamber would help to detect the fragmentation
of the cloud. Additionally, the new optical imaging is necessary for trapping experiments
with 2D magnetic lattices.

Figure 5: Vertical imaging view of trapped cloud 1D magnetic lattice (a) and its zoom-in image [6]

4. Future plan
In the future, the following steps need to be carried out:
Optimize the optical setup and the controlling program. To be specific, it is required
to re-align the trapping MOT beams to obtain a good MOT. After that, the Labview
parameters controlling the bias fields, running time need to be optimized for the
new sub-micron period magnetic lattice in each experimental stage. It is expected to
use the 5 m - period 1D magnetic lattice for this optimization purpose for simplicity.
After achieving good results, a BEC if possible, in the 5 m -period 1D magnetic
lattice, trapping atoms in the 0.7 m -period 1D magnetic lattice would be carried out.
The experiment sequence would be very similar to the trapping sequence used for the
5 m -period 1D magnetic lattice except for a change in the U/Z wire connection
which can be done easily thanks to the 4 U/Z wire structure of the new atom chip.
Since this is a very tight trap, the trapped atoms are expected to have a high 3-body
recombination loss, which is quite challenging to counteract. Furthermore, the atoms
will be trapped very close to the chip surface, around 350 nm, which will experience
surface interactions such as van der Waals attractive force and Johnson noise. To
 overcome the van der Waals effect, one can increase the trapping frequency but it
should not be too high in order to avoid 3-body recombination loss and spin flip
losses.
Perform tunnelling experiments in the 0.7 m -period 1D magnetic lattice. If
successful, this would be the first tunnelling experiments done in a magnetic lattice.
From the simulation results, the tunnelling time for 0.7 m -period 1D magnetic
lattice is about 15 ms and the critical point for the quantum phase transition is at 9.5
mG. Initially, it is necessary to have good condensates in the magnetic traps at zero or
small trap depth. At first, the trap will be turned off by switching off the bias field and
letting the trapped cloud fly freely. Since at this moment, at a very small trap depth
there is no lattice, no interference pattern would be observed. As we increase the trap
depth, some interference patterns should appear and become clearer due to the
tunnelling of atoms between the magnetic traps. At larger trap depth, the interference
patterns would start to disappear as we enter the Mott insulator region.
For the trapping in the 2D magnetic lattices, besides the bias field Bby, it is required to
have another bias field in the x-direction for the trapping. The experiment sequences
are expected to be the same as in the trapping for the 1D magnetic lattice. For the
imaging of the 2D trap, it is necessary to view under the vacuum chamber, which
images perpendicularly to the atom chip surface. This will help to observe the
behaviour of atoms in the 2D lattice traps as well as optimizing the Labview
parameters. Also, it is worth providing a magnetic field during the imaging sequence
which assists in providing a quantization axis for the imaging.
A summary of the future plan is the following:
From To Task
Now 02/2016 - Redesign, assemble and optimize the optical setup
03/2016 05/2016 - Trapping ultracold atoms in 5 m period 1D magnetic lattice
06/2016 08/2016 - Trapping ultracold atoms in 0.7 m period 1D magnetic lattice
09/2016 12/2016 - Performing quantum tunneling experiments on 0.7 m period 1D
magnetic lattice
01/2017 02/2017 - Data analysis
02/2017 05/2017 - Trapping ultracold atoms in 0.7 m period 2D square magnetic lattice
05/2017 08/2017 - Performing quantum tunneling experiments on 0.7 m period 2D square
magnetic lattice
09/2017 10/2017 - Data analysis
11/2017 05/2018 - Writing thesis

Performing quantum tunnelling experiments in magnetic lattices is expected to be quite

challenging. So far, there have been tunnelling experiments done in optical lattices. However,
none has been done in magnetic lattices. Therefore, another plan has been designed in case
we cannot observe tunnelling phenomena in the 0.7 m period 1D magnetic lattice. We
would proceed with loading and trapping Rb atoms in the 2D square magnetic lattice and
then the 2D triangular magnetic lattice. Trapping atoms in 2D magnetic lattices has been
done in the Amsterdam group, however, with a much larger lattice period (5 m ). Therefore,
if successful, trapping atoms in our sub-micron 2D magnetic lattices would be a significant
achievement.
5. References
[1] Sukumar, C. V., & Brink, D. M. (1997). Spin-flip transitions in a magnetic trap. Physical
Review A, 56(3), 2451.

[2] Hulet, R. LINE triggering circuit.

[3] Dedman, C. J., Dall, R. G., Byron, L. J., & Truscott, A. G. (2007). Active cancellation of
stray magnetic fields in a Bose-Einstein condensation experiment. Review of Scientific
Instruments, 78(2), 024703.

[4] Wang, Y., & Herrera, I. LINE triggering circuit in ultracold atom experiments.

[5] Wang, Y., Herrera, I., & Brolis, A. Active stray magnetic field cancellation.

[6] Wang, Y., & Tran, T. Two-dimensional imaging system.