A magneto-ponderomotive trap for ultracold plasmas

Full text: A novel magneto-ponderomotive trap is proposed to generate and confine ultracold plasmas. Rubidium atoms loaded from a standard MOT into a sparsely populated, 1-D blue-detuned optical lattice will serve as the starting point for this experiment. After the MOT is turned off, the lattice beam intensity will be raised by several orders of magnitude using a pulsed Ti:sapphire amplifier. The increase in intensity can be slow enough to allow for quasi-adiabatic lowering of the lattice potential wells. A homogenous magnetic field aligned with the laser beams will be simultaneously ramped to 500 gauss. In this environment, the atoms are now photoionized to create a plasma with Te = 1 K and Tion = 1 mK. The electron component of the plasma is subject to transverse magnetic confinement, as well as axial ponderomotive confinement in the standing optical field. The trap strength can be varied to allow for maximal tuning of the electron-electron and electron-ion collision rates. This opens the possibility of manipulating the timescale and character of the ultracold plasma evolution. (author)