Engineering atom chips

Friday 23/10/2009 14:30

For this week’s colloquium, on Friday 9th October, we’re delighted that Michael Kraft of our own School of Electronics & Computer Science will give a talk about ‘Engineering atom chips’. This colloquium will be of particular interest to those in the quantum/nano/photonics areas, and undergraduates will, as always, be most welcome.

Atom Chips are a new and exciting technology that enable the manipulation of atoms close to a chip surface. These chips combine cold atom physics with MEMS microfabrication techniques to create electric, magnetic and optical fields to trap and manipulate ultra-cold atom clouds.

The microfabricated chips realise optical cavities, electrostatic actuators and current carrying wires to set up magnetic trapping fields. Besides fundamental physics experiments, there are a range of novel devices and sensors on the horizon that use this technology. In prototype devices, atom chips are already being used to make Bose Einstein condensates for applications including atomic clocks on a chip, atom interferometry, and quantum information processing.

The talk will describe micro-fabrication technologies that can realize the required building blocks and components to realize such atom chips. It will mainly focus on the microfabrication and design engineering aspects of these chips, as they almost entirely rely on non-standard fabrication techniques, which need to be specially developed for these chips. Additionally, they combine a range of different physical domains such as optical, magnetic and electrostatics, which makes their design and realization challenging.

2:30 in the Physics Seminar Room, Tea and cakes afterwards

Programme online

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