Accumulation of chromium metastable atoms into an optical trap

10/05/2007
Article, Chromium

Arnaud Pouderous Bruno Laburthe-Tolra Etienne Maréchal Jean-Claude Keller Laurent Vernac Olivier Gorceix Quentin Beaufils Radu Chicireanu

We report the fast accumulation of a large number of metastable 52Cr atoms in a mixed trap, formed by the superposition of a strongly confining optical trap and a quadrupolar magnetic trap.
arXiv:0705.1479 (2007) / Eur. Phys. J. D 45, 189 (2007)

The steady state is reached after about 400 ms, providing a cloud of more than one million metastable atoms at a temperature of about 100 μK, with a peak density of 10¹⁸ atoms m^-3.

We have optimized the loading procedure, and measured the light shift of the ⁵D₄ state by analyzing how the trapped atoms respond to a parametric excitation.

We compare this result to a theoretical evaluation based on the available spectroscopic data for chromium atoms.

Schematic of the imaging system.