Evanescent light-wave atom mirrors, resonators, waveguides, and traps

Publisher Summary This chapter presents an overview of atom mirrors, resonators, waveguides, and traps that operate for the most part on the evanescent light-wave mechanism for atom manipulation. For many years, it has been known that light can be used to trap and manipulate small dielectric particles and atoms. In particular, the intense coherent light of lasers has been used to cool neutral atoms down to the micro-Kelvin and now even the nano-Kelvin regimes. The chapter discusses several convex, evanescent light-wave traps or guides in which at least one field is red-detuned, and hence attractive but a centrifugal force or a blue-detuned field provides a repulsive counterforce to allow the atoms to remain confined in stable orbits around the convex, dielectric, and optical resonator. The chapter focuses on the use of the evanescent field for making atom mirrors, resonators, waveguides, and traps. One of the principal experimental drawbacks of the evanescent light-wave mirror is that it requires quite high laser power to produce a sufficiently large potential barrier to reflect atoms with any realistic component of velocity normal to the surface, while not introducing an unacceptable degree of spontaneous emission probability.

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