Atom laser-cooling and atom manipulation

Recently, the laser-cooling and laser manipulation of Rubidium-87 atoms have reached an outstanding level of maturity and reliability. Former French SME Muquans – now part of iXblue – has demonstrated over the last years the maturity of its Quantum Sensors based on cold-atoms for applications outside of the lab. They are now deployed in the field all around the world from Antartica to the top of Mount Etna, demonstrating that the TRL is now at 9 for ground use.

As seen on the schematics below, any cold-atom set-up involves two main systems :

• An ultra-high vacuum system at room temperature that hosts the atoms
• A laser system that provides the optical beams required to manipulate the atoms

One of the main reasons that makes today laser-cooling of Rubidium atoms so straightforward lies in the ability to rely on fully integrated turn-key the laser system emitting at 780 nm, namely the ILS laser Series. After several years of R&D and customer experience, iXblue has tremendously improved their performances while remarkably decreasing their Size Weight, Power and Costs requirements.

A first laser – called master laser – is used to provide a fixed well-known frequency reference. One or several additional laser – called slave lasers – are then phase locked to the master laser.

Atom cooling and atom manipulation require stringent optical specifications, that can only be obtained by using ultra low-noise electronics. iXblue has gathered a deep expertise in this domain and developed its own drivers.

The control of the optical frequencies at 780 nm in terms of accuracy, agility and stability is enabled by a Radio-Frequency synthesis chain.

A cold-atom set-up involves the control of hundreds of analog and digital signals to drive the various components, collect the experimental data and make sure that everything is running well. iXblue’s laser system onboards a local computer allowing real-time collection and processing of analog and digital signals. This ensures an automated turn-key operation of the laser systems, and provide a pleasant user experience to the end user.

This outstanding achievement is a clear demonstration of the maturity of cold-atom technologies. Read more about it.

Before sending the laser beams to the vacuum chamber, it is necessary to combine and splitt the outputs of the laser system to reach all of the optical viewports of the vacuum system. The iMOB series provided by iXblue provides such optial dispatch capability and can adapt to any configuration.

The iMOB780 are fibered optical benches exploiting micro-optics technologies to integrate optical functions such as power splitting, combining, optical switching, frequency shifters, within a compact and ultra-stable package. Usual free-space optics set-ups are now turned into turn-key maintenance-free fibered sub-systems. They feature remarkable stability and have a high optical power level capability to several watts.