Magneto-optical trap and Zeeman slower with consecutive coils for cooling and trapping atoms.

Strong-coupled ultracold neutral plasmas    

In recent years, ultracold neutral plasmas (UNPs), as strongly coupled plasma available in the laboratory, have gradually been the focus in the experimental and theoretical plasma physics studies ^[1]. We have built magneto-optical traps for the Rb atom and Ca atom, and produced the UNPs through photoionization of cold atoms. Some characteristic parameter, such as the potential well depth, the threshold ion number, the lifetime of UNP have been experimentally investigated ^[2]. Here, we propose to study the temperature of UNPs, as well as the Coulomb coupling parameter, through the state-of-the-art ion velocity map imaging (VMI) technique, which can measure the kinetic energy distribution of charged particles accurately ^[3]. In addition, we propose to study the cold collision dynamics between cold atoms and ions by a hybrid trap, which combines a MOT with a linear Paul trap overlapping in space.

[1] T. C. Killian, Nature 429, 24 (2004); Nature 441, 18 (2006); Science 316, 4 (2007); Science 363, 61 (2019)

[2] Syed Zaheeruddin, Yufan Li, Dongmei Zhao, Xinwen Ma and Jie Yang  Plasma Sci. Technol. 20, 085001 (2018)

[3] Yu-Fan Li, Dong-Mei Zhao, Wen-Chang Zhou, Dong-Bin Qian, Jie Yang, Shao-Feng Zhang, Xiao-Long Zhu, Xin-Wen Ma, International Journal of Mass Spectrometry 442 (2019) 23-28