Atom throw and catch (experiment)

Mathis Roussel (03/2024-08/2024): Mathis worked on the experimental setup to reproduce and go beyond an experiment demonstrated by the group of Prof. Jaewook Ahn (KAIST, Korea) on accelerating, throwing and recapturing atoms with moving optical tweezers. He succeeded! and by throwing atoms, we can now bring them at much closer distance to each other’s than previously with static tweezers. Thanks Mathis and now enjoy your master at ETH Zurich.

Atom throw and catch (theory)

Axel-Ugo Leriche (03/2024-08/2024): Axel worked on the theoretical aspect of throwing and catching atoms with optical tweezers, together with Mathis (see above post). He generated helpful simulations guiding us in the good choice of parameters, as well as illustrative animations of moving tweezers (and flying atoms) that everyone in the group (and visitors) enjoyed much. Congrats Axel-Ugo and best wishes for your master 2 in Paris.

Spectral shaping of picosecond laser pulses (Part II: tuning of CBG and pulse compression)

Sapna Hassanaly (04/2024-08/2024): Sapna took over the work of Arnab on characterizing the chirp of CBGs (chirped Bragg gratings). Going beyond our previous achievements, she upgraded the CBG system to control its temperature, and more precisely, the temperature gradient through its length. This allows to tune the chirp of the CBG which she could successfully observe with her measurement bench. Finally, she used two CBGs to chirp (with opposite signs) two laser pulses of 780 and 1250 nm and then, after sum-frequency-generation, she could generate a spectrally-compressed 480 nm pulse. In particular, she generated the most-compressed pulse ever generated in our group, obtained a bandwidth of 20 GHz (the record was 60 GHz so far). Congrats Sapna, and see you after the holidays for starting your PhD work with us again : ) Enjoy the Olympics !

Characterization of Spatial Light Modulators (Part II: phase noise)

Isaline Duperon (05/2024-08/2024): Isaline continued the project of Bee on characterizing SLM (Spatial Light Modulators) based on liquid crystals. In particular, she tackled the question of the noise imprinted by the SLM on the laser beam, an important point when considering that the laser beam will be used for very precise manipulation of neutral atoms (trapping, excitation, …). She developed an optical test-bench for measuring the phase noise imprinted by the fluctuating liquid crystals and measured it for the first time in our laboratory (and we didn’t find other measurement in the open scientific literature!). She also compared the performance of two SLMs from different manufacturers. Finally, she pushed her project further and measured the intensity noise of a holographic tweezers array generated with the SLM. Thanks Isaline for your effort, the knowledge gained in this project helps us to understand more the possible errors caused by SLM. Have fun for your Master in Stockholm.   

Characterization of Spatial Light Modulators (Part I: diffraction efficiency and phase calibration)

“Bee” Phatwarach Siriworakoonchai (02/2024-06/2024): This project focuses on the setup, optimization, and testing of high-speed Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) systems, achieving operation at 1 kHz. Bee  is developing software that aims to enable parallel atom manipulation and versatile single-atom addressing patterns with SLM. The advancement promises significant enhancements in the flexibility and efficiency of optical tweezer arrays, marking a critical step forward in quantum manipulation techniques.

Homebuilt Lasers for Coherent Rydberg Excitation

Karthikeyan Ganesan (07/2023-05/2024): Karthikeyan’s project revolved around trying Rydberg excitation of Rubidium atoms using a homebuilt 780 nm cw laser as well as a commercial 480 nm laser. Thanks to a collaboration with the group of Prof. Christian Gross (Tubingen, Germany), we learnt about their design of IF-ECDL laser and reproduced it successfully in our laboratory. After constructing and testing the laser, Karthikeyan then stabilized its frequency with a PDH lock on a highly-stable Fabry-Perot cavity. He then shone the 780 and 480 nm lasers to the atoms to test Rydberg excitation and could get a signal in the last week of his project: nice job Karthikeyan !

Spectral shaping of picosecond laser pulses (Part I: characterization of CBG)

Arnab Maity (07/2023-05/2024): Arnab focused his effort on characterizing and using a chirped Bragg grating (CBG), a highly dispersive optical component, for spectral shaping of our picosecond pulses. For our ultrafast Rydberg experiments, we require pulses with a duration of 10 – 100 picoseconds to perform excitation of a valence electron from its ground state to a giant Rydberg orbital. Our group is interested in using CBGs to imprint a large chirp on our pulses. His work was first to precisely characterize the CBG chirp, for which he developed 2 test benches resulting in a measurement precision 10 times better than the results of the CBG manufacturer! Followingly, he used the CBG and the chirped laser pulse to perform an advanced type of coherent excitation called Rapid Adiabatic Passage.  His efforts resulted in a good step forward for our group in the ultrafast manipulation of Rydberg states, and was later continued by Sapna. Thanks Arnab and best of luck for your PhD in France !

Optimizing AODs for Atom Rearrangement in Optical Tweezers

“Beam” Kittisak Ketaiam (01/2024-05/2024): Beam’s internship project was on optimizing the efficiency of Acousto-Optic Deflectors (AODs) for the parallel rearrangement of atoms within optical tweezers. By enhancing the AOD’s bandwidth and correcting wavefront aberrations, his work intends to improve the performance of moving tweezers, an important tool for cold-atom experiments.

Developing Broadband Microwave Drives for Rydberg Atom Manipulation

Eduard Braun (02/2024-05/2024): Eduard worked on how a microwave drive could tune the interaction between Rydberg atoms. On one side, he developed the microwave hardware allowing polarization control across frequencies ranging from 24 to 60GHz. On the other side, he created a numerical model to explore how to choose the microwave parameters to precisely tune he Rydberg interaction, with potential applications of high fidelity two-qubit gates in neutral atom quantum computing.

Optical Ruler for Ultra-Precise Atomic Positioning (Part II)

Sota Kitade (04/2022 – 03/2024): Kitade-kun developed an optical ruler to (ultra-)precisely measure the position of atoms in our vacuum chambers. Indeed, we create an array of atoms held in holographic tweezers, and we were wondering if the tweezers (and thus the atoms) are located precisely where we want them to sit. We just developed a technique, that we call “optical ruler”, to measure the atom position by interfering two laser beams that then form a standing wave (the ruler). The lasers are chosen resonant with an atomic transition, and the measurement of the scattering rate of the atom in this standing wave tell us what is the atom position. With this technique, Kitade-kun has shown that there was 130 nm of uncertainty of position. Even more, based on this information, he corrected the hologram and could decrease this uncertainty to 70 nm. This study is an important part of our publication “ultra-precise holographic optical tweezers” (arXiv:2407.20699). Thanks and congrats Kitade-kun !

Titanium-Sapphire Laser for Large-Scale Atomic Array

Masato Tsugaoka (04/2022 – 12/2023): Tsugaoka-kun was in charge of installing a new laser system for trapping atoms. He characterized the beam profile of the laser and worked on improving it to obtain a good coupling of the laser beam into an optical fiber for delivery to the experimental setup. After several efforts with the laser company to debug problems in the manufacturing of the laser, he could finally obtained a successful coupling and we are now routinely using his laser system to trap atoms in our tweezers experiment. O-tsukare-sama Tsugaoka-kun !

Sub-Microsecond Laser Phase Noise Eater (Part III)

Oscar Guillemant (05/2023-08/2023). Oscar joined the team during his summer holidays to work with Tom, his friend from childhoold ! Together, they produced multiple phase noise eaters. Thanks for your contribution, Oscar And enjoy working with NASA next!

Sub-Microsecond Laser Phase Noise Eater (Part II)

Tom Denecker (02/2023-08/2023). As Tom enjoyed playing with laser phase noise so much in his 1st internship, he joined back the group for a second one! He upgraded the electronic system for the detection and feedforward cancellation of laser phase noise and obtained even more impressive results than last time. Have fun for the Master in Palaiseau and see you in one year for starting the PhD work ; )

Optical Ruler for Ultra-Precise Atomic Positioning (Part I)

Jorge Mauricio (12/2023-03/2023): Jorge joined for a spring-break internship during his bachelor studies at the University of Kyoto. Together with Tomita-sensei, he developed an optical breadboard for creating and interfering two laser beams to form a standing wave. It serves as an “optical ruler” to precisely measure the position of atoms in our vacuum chamber. Jorge succesfully completed the system and obtained a first experimental signature from the atom. After going back to Kyoto University to complete his bachelor, Kitade-kun took over the project (see Part II), which is now part of one of our scientific publication (“ultra-precise holographic optical tweezers”, arXiv:2407.20699). Thanks for joining and happy to have you back in the team for the Master/PhD program of Sokendai from 2024.

Titanium-Sapphire Laser for Large-Scale Atomic Array

Masato Tsugaoka (04/2022 – 12/2023): Tsugaoka-kun was in charge of installing a new laser system for trapping atoms. He characterized the beam profile of the laser and worked on improving it to obtain a good coupling of the laser beam into an optical fiber for delivery to the experimental setup. After several efforts with the laser company to debug problems in the manufacturing of the laser, he could finally obtained a successful coupling and we are now routinely using his laser system to trap atoms in our tweezers experiment. O-tsukare-sama Tsugaoka-kun !

Sub-Microsecond Laser Phase Noise Eater (Part I)

Tom Denecker (04/2022-08/2022). After much patience for the Japanese border to re-open following the global health crisis, Tom could finally join the group for an internship. Following on a side project of Sylvain on measuring and correcting the fast phase noise of lasers, Tom took the project to the next step. While the initial setup was based on free-space optics, Tom upgraded it to a fiberized system and could successfully reproduce and improve the experiment. His project was continued by … himself … see Part II.

Generation of sub-nanosecond pulses from a cw-laser (Part II: semiconductor optical amplifier)

Robin Kocik (05/2022-08/2022): We continued the project started with Matsubara-kun by replacing the awful electro-optic Pockel cell (slow, hard to drive, …) by two faster and fancier devices: a 100 picosecond-scale electro-optic switch (see Part III) and a nanosecond-scale semiconductor optical amplifier

Generation of sub-nanosecond pulses from a cw-laser (Part I: the )

Takuya Matsubara (02/2022-03/2022): Matsubara-kun took a short break from his PhD studies in the field of atto-second science at Tokyo University and RIKEN, and briefly joined our group to work on much slower, nanosecond-scale, laser pulses (for us, they are still very fast though!). He made the first prototype for generating nanosecond-scale pulses at 780 nm using an electro-optic Pockel cell and obtained our first signal of Rabi oscillation between the electronic ground state (5S) and the first excited orbital (5P) of Rubidium atoms. This research project, started with Matsubara-kun is very active, with two follow-up student projects (see Part II and Part III) and even now one of the topics of the PhD of Robin Kocik. After completing his PhD, Matsubara-kun joined the group as a Research Assistant Professor, and now supervising some student projects!

YAO 2022 Stuttgart visit

Mahesh Tirumalasetty Panduranga, February 28, 2022

About conference: YAO 2022 conference organised by university of Stuttgart this year. This conference is tradationally organised by local PhD students of the host university aimed for young PhD students working on atomic and molecular physics. I got opportunity to participate in YAO 2022 on site conference where I presented poster and gave a talk. This conference structured in three sessions for 5 days where we had talk session , discussion during poster session and lab visits. There were invited professor speakers from different universities and we can also have discussion with them during coffee breaks. This helps me to intereact more with other students as well as professors which helps me to understand about wide range of research works.

Benefit from this conference: I personally enjoyed the talk about Rydberg physics using atoms and molecule. Its interesting to know about the idea for making molecular quantum simulator because in our group itself we are aiming for ultrafast quantum simulators using atoms. This helps me to understand about my resarch work in wider picture.

Venue place: Stuttgart is very beautiful city to explore natures and a fancy car museums. During conference break we went to eat local city food and beer which is one of the best part.  

Lab-visit: I also did lab visit of Prof. Tilman Pfau in university of Stuttgart. Its really interesting to see there home made ion-microscope setup and technique to resolve closely spaced atoms. Now they can make Rydberg-ion molecule and also compute the bond length using there ion-mircoscope. I really enjoyed to see this advanced version of quantum gas microscope experiment.

Cold Atom Predoc School in Les Houches 2022 “Quantum Mixtures”

Rene Villela, September 26th to October 7th, 2022

About the school: The Cold Atom Predoc School in Les Houches, Francce, is a yearly school held in the alps region close to the border with Switzerland. The objective of the school is to give students at an early stage of their graduate studies in the cold atoms field the necessary knowledge on laser cooling and trapping, ultracold collisions, quantum gases and optical lattices. The school lasts for two weeks with two poster sessions where the participating students have the opportunity to present and discuss their results with other students and lecturers.

How this school benefitted me: I had the amazing opportunity to meet and befriend many talented young students doing research on cold atoms from various parts of the world. The lectures helped me reinforce my knowledge about laser cooling and trapping. Thanks to the lectures, I also discovered new research interests like periodically driven systems and topological effects. On a personal level, I was enamored by the breathtaking views of the alps, happily gained a few kilos eating baguette and fromage bleu and enjoyed sightseeing in my free time.

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