Image of the week: guiding atoms with lasers

By Thomas Farrell on July 18, 2016

Lasers have been used to control the motion of atoms for some time now, which in turn allow atoms to be cooled, trapped and manipulated in tother ways. in their paper Guiding of atoms in helical optical potential structures, researchers from King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology and King Saud University study the dynamics of an atom trapped in a helical optical potential. Anwar Al Rsheed et al show how variation in the optical and gravitational potentials effect the cold atoms’ motion through a cylindrical optical lattice.

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Front Image and article image: The helical optical tube with mode l = 1 and p = 0., adapted from Anwar Al Rsheed et al 2016 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 49 125002 and © IOP Publishing. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.