Speaker
Description
Optical tweezers are a powerful tool for the manipulation of neutral atoms in ultracold quantum gases. In particular single atom optical tweezers have become an established technique in state of the art quantum gas experiments. Thus retrofitting existing experimental setups with single atom tweezers allows for exploration of novel physics beyond original experimental capabilities. However, in contrast to systems purpose-built from the ground up, preexisting experiments impose additional geometrical and optical constraints that complicate such an upgrade.
Here, I present ongoing development toward a single atom optical tweezer for an existing Rb based Bose-Einstein condensate experiment with singular Cs impurities as a case study. First, the requirements for single atom trapping are considered in conjunction with limitations imposed by the existing apparatus in order to asses the feasibility of different solutions. This analysis motivates the development of a custom microscope objective tailored to the experimental geometry. The objective is designed via ray tracing based on lens layouts from comparable objectives. Furthermore, a simple optical test setup utilizing the knife edge method is constructed in order to characterize assembled objectives.
This work demonstrates a relatively low cost route towards integrating optics for a single atom tweezer tailored to an experiment‘s preexisting constraints without commissioning an expensive custom objective.