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Atom chips allow to manipulate ultra-cold thermal clouds or BECs microns above a conducting surface by means of magnetic and electro-static fields. The current and charge carrying structures creating these potentials are fabricated by standard microfabrication technology. On this poster we are going to report on recent progress in our atom chip experiments.
In our setup disorder potentials which arise from imperfections in the chip surface have been observed to be two orders of magnitude smaller than in experiments done in other groups: With BECs as a sensitive probe we have been able to study fluctuations of the trapping potentials below dB/B ~ 10-5 at atom to surface distances in the micron range. This reduction is due to lithographically fabricating the atom chip structures into high quality evaporated gold layers. Using these smooth potentials we started to do experiments investigating the 1D-regime: transport of a BEC along a guide, formation of a BEC in a 1D thermal cloud and dynamics of BEC in tightly confining traps and guides. In these experiments the high demands on chip fabrication technology become important and possibilities for coherent manipulation of matter waves can be judged. The final atom chip as a robust and versatile device would open up many possible advances in different fields ranging from precision measurements to implementations of quantum information processing and communication. |