A hybrid trapping architecture combining an atom chip with a printed circuit board used for continuous adjustment of the system’s dimensionality.

The latest results from one of the ultracold atom experiments in the Quantum Systems and Devices group have now been published in Physical Review Letters.

This work used the microfabricated "atom chip" structures inside the vacuum chamber to create Bose-Einstein condensates of around 100,000 rubidium atoms trapped close to the chip surface. The atom chip trap was used to make the atomic cloud highly elongated so that the relevant physics becomes effectively one-dimensional, at which point fluctuations in the phase of the cloud then appear. The tunability of our trapping setup allows us to smoothly change the elongation of the condensate, taking it from a three-dimensional system to a one-dimensional system, and in doing so, systematically study the appearance of the phase fluctuations as a function of all the relevant parameters.

The peer-reviewed paper "Probing the Degree of Coherence through the Full 1D to 3D Crossover" can be read in Physical Review Letters.

Further information: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.123401

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