PREPARATION OF A HIGH PERFORMANCE MICROTRAP

Abstract

Microfabricated chips are robust resources to trap and manipulate ultra-cold atoms with precision. Such traps allow for excellent control over the location of atoms and provide versatile trapping potentials. Here efforts towards developing a novel compound atom chip structure and characterizing it are presented. Various properties of atom chips important to a cold-atom experiment are studied. A model for an efficient loss-less transportation of cold atoms using a chip based conveyor belt is developed and implemented. Besides this efforts to prepare an efficient fluorescence imaging system and methods to calibrate the system are discussed.