Expand this Topic clickable element to expand a topic
Skip to content
Optica Publishing Group

Laser focusing of atomic beams

Not Accessible

Your library or personal account may give you access

Abstract

The focusing of an atomic beam using near-resonant laser light is considered. Path-integral techniques are employed to transform the problem into a standard diffraction integral. This approach is general and allows us to deal with thick laser lenses. Starting from the basic form of the potential energy for an atom in a laser beam, we derive the propagation kernel for the atomic wave function for the particular case of a TEM01*, or doughnut, mode laser beam. Both the full three-dimensional propagation kernel and its paraxial approximation are discussed. We show that the paraxial case can be obtained from the three-dimensional case by a stationary-phase approximation of the propagation equation. Numerical results for the focusing of a Gaussian atomic beam are presented. These results show that spot diameters on the order of 20 Å are obtainable for many reasonable choices of laser and atomic beam parameters and that for most of these cases the thin-lens approximation is not valid. The effects of the lowest-order aberrations are also briefly discussed. Spherical aberration is found to contribute significantly to the focal spot diameter, at least for the doughnut mode laser beam considered here.

© 1991 Optical Society of America

Full Article  |  PDF Article
More Like This
Laser focusing of atoms: a particle-optics approach

J. J. McClelland and M. R. Scheinfein
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 8(9) 1974-1986 (1991)

Optical potential for atom guidance in a dark hollow laser beam

Jianping Yin, Yifu Zhu, Wenbao Wang, Yuzhu Wang, and Wonho Jhe
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 15(1) 25-33 (1998)

Cited By

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an Optica member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access Optica Member Subscription

Figures (5)

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Figure files are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an Optica member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access Optica Member Subscription

Equations (25)

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Equations are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an Optica member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access Optica Member Subscription

Select as filters


Select Topics Cancel
© Copyright 2024 | Optica Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved