Experimental facilities

• Rubidium Bose-Einstien condensate setup

This experimental setup has been built with some novel elements to the approach of producing BEC. Two variations of this experimental setup for generating BEC of ultracold ⁸⁷Rb atoms have been made operational. The first of these setup used ⁸⁷Rb that are evaporatively cooled in a magnetic trap. A novel approach has been employed for preparing a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of ⁸⁷Rb atoms using electro- pneumatically driven transfer of atoms into a Quadrupole-Ioffe magnetic trap (QUIC Trap). The second of these setups (the current setup) uses an hybrid trap (Optical and magnetic gradient confinement)for trapping Rb atoms and achieving BEC by forced evaporative cooling. This same experimental platform is being used to perform the experiments on Quantum-Classical crossover, and this setup will also be used to engineer long range interactions between Rb atoms for studying novel phases of matter. Fig: time-of-flight images of the BEC phase transition observed in our hybrid trap (image:Sumit Sarkar's thesis)


• Strontium Magneto Optical Trap (MOT) setup

The second experimental setup is being built using Strontium (Sr) atoms. This setup would form the essential part of the Atom+Plasmon coupling studies. The long-lived metastable states in Sr would enable coherent manipulation of the atomic state for Quantum information studies. As a part of the construction of this setup, the group has been indigenously developing a variety of technology. We have successfully constructed frequency doubling system for generating 461 nm from a 922 nm laser light source with an efficiency of over 30%. We have also designed and built a variety of Data-acquisition and control systems to replace expensive and imported systems. A compact Atomic beam source of Sr has been constructed and preliminary spectroscopic signals of various Sr atoms have been obtained. This spectroscopy system will be useful in stabilizing the laser for cooling of Sr atoms. Fig: scattered 461 nm light from the trapped laser cooled strontium atom cloud