Abstract

We report on a far above saturation absorption imaging technique to investigate the characteristics of dense packets of ultracold atoms. The transparency of the cloud is controlled by the incident light intensity as a result of the nonlinear response of the atoms to the probe beam. We detail our experimental procedure to calibrate the imaging system for reliable quantitative measurements and demonstrate the use of this technique to extract the profile and its spatial extent of an optically thick atomic cloud.

© 2007 Optical Society of America

Calibrating high intensity absorption imaging of ultracold atoms

Klaus Hueck, Niclas Luick, Lennart Sobirey, Jonas Siegl, Thomas Lompe, Henning Moritz, Logan W. Clark, and Cheng Chin
Opt. Express 25(8) 8670-8679 (2017)

Absorption imaging of ultracold atoms on atom chips

David A. Smith, Simon Aigner, Sebastian Hofferberth, Michael Gring, Mauritz Andersson, Stefan Wildermuth, Peter Krüger, Stephan Schneider, Thorsten Schumm, and Jörg Schmiedmayer
Opt. Express 19(9) 8471-8485 (2011)

Dense atom clouds in a holographic atom trap

R. Newell, J. Sebby, and T. G. Walker
Opt. Lett. 28(14) 1266-1268 (2003)

Doppler cooling of an optically dense cloud of magnetically trapped atoms

Piet O. Schmidt, Sven Hensler, Jörg Werner, Thomas Binhammer, Axel Görlitz, and Tilman Pfau
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 20(5) 960-967 (2003)

Direct Measurement of the Atom Number in a Bose Condensate

Hung-Wen Cho, Yan-Cheng He, Thorsten Peters, Yi-Hsin Chen, Han-Chang Chen, Sheng-Chiun Lin, Yi-Chi Lee, and Ite A. Yu
Opt. Express 15(19) 12114-12122 (2007)