Proceedings

EPJ D Highlight - Ultra-cold atom transport made simple

Figure 1.a. from the original paper Caption: “Schematic representation of the physical system consisting of a ring trap and two dipole waveguides for injecting neutral atoms into, extracting them from, and velocity filtering them in the ring waveguide.” © Loiko et al.

New study provides proof of the validity of a filtering device for ultra-cold neutral atoms based on tunnelling

Techniques for controlling ultra-cold atoms travelling in ring traps currently represent an important research area in physics. A new study published in EPJ D gives a proof of principle, confirmed by numerical simulations, of the applicability to ultra-cold atoms of a very efficient and robust transport technique called spatial adiabatic passage (SAP). Yu Loiko from the University of Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues have, for the first time, applied SAP to inject, extract, and filter the velocity of neutral atoms from and into a ring trap. Such traps are key to improving our understanding of phenomena involving ultra-cold atoms, which are relevant to high-precision applications such as atom optics, quantum metrology, quantum computation, and quantum simulation.

The authors focused on controlling the transfer of a single atom between the outermost waveguides of a system composed of two dipole waveguides and a ring trap, using the SAP technique. They calculated the explicit conditions for SAP tunnelling, which depend on two factors: the atomic velocity along the input waveguide and the initial atom population distribution among what physicists refer to as the transverse vibrational states.

To check the performance of the proposed approach, they relied on a numerical integration of the corresponding equation—namely the so-called two-dimensional Schrödinger—with parameter values for rubidium atoms and an optical dipole ring trap. Although the SAP technique had previously been reported on with regard to experiments using light beams, it had yet to be applied to the case of cold atoms.

Potential applications of these findings include the preparation of cold atom ring systems to investigate quantum phase transitions, matter wave Sagnac interferometry, the stability of persistent currents and superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), propagation of matter wave solitons and vortices, cold collisions, artificial electromagnetism, etc.

This was our first experience of publishing with EPJ Web of Conferences. We contacted the publisher in the middle of September, just one month prior to the Conference, but everything went through smoothly. We have had published MNPS Proceedings with different publishers in the past, and would like to tell that the EPJ Web of Conferences team was probably the best, very quick, helpful and interactive. Typically, we were getting responses from EPJ Web of Conferences team within less than an hour and have had help at every production stage.
We are very thankful to Solange Guenot, Web of Conferences Publishing Editor, and Isabelle Houlbert, Web of Conferences Production Editor, for their support. These ladies are top-level professionals, who made a great contribution to the success of this issue. We are fully satisfied with the publication of the Conference Proceedings and are looking forward to further cooperation. The publication was very fast, easy and of high quality. My colleagues and I strongly recommend EPJ Web of Conferences to anyone, who is interested in quick high-quality publication of conference proceedings.

On behalf of the Organizing and Program Committees and Editorial Team of MNPS-2019, Dr. Alexey B. Nadykto, Moscow State Technological University “STANKIN”, Moscow, Russia. EPJ Web of Conferences vol. 224 (2019)

ISSN: 2100-014X (Electronic Edition)

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