Optics

We demonstrate a robust method for the efficient optically levitated loading of ultracold Cs atoms in a crossed dipole trap. When preparing a large number of atomic samples, a large-volume crossed dipole trap is required to form a shallow but very efficient loading potential.

The ability to process optical signals without passing into the electrical domain has always attracted the attention of the research community. Processing photons by photons unfolds new scenarios, in principle allowing for unseen signal processing and computing capabilities.

The mode field intensity, spot size, central peak intensity evolution and adiabaticity are calculated for different points along the transition of an optical fibre taper that adiabatically tapers from the standard 125 nm down to 1 µm and then to 440 nm diameter for low loss operation at 1550 nm wavelength.

Conventional imaging systems comprise large and expensive optical components that successively mitigate aberrations. Metasurface optics offers a route to miniaturize imaging systems by replacing bulky components with flat and compact implementations. The diffractive nature of these devices, however, induces severe chromatic aberrations, and current multiwavelength and narrowband achromatic metasurfaces cannot support full visible spectrum imaging (400 to 700 nm).