2020/08/19 by C. Veit, N. Zuber, O. A. Herrera-Sancho +7
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Materials Characterization Techniques #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Dust and Plasma Wave Phenomena #Field ion microscope #Image resolution #Ion #Laser #Microscope #Microscopy #Optical lattice #Quantum #Wavelength #cond-mat.quant-gas #physics.atom-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevx.11.011036
published as Phys. Rev. X 11, 011036 (2021)
arxiv created 2020/08/19 · openalex created_date 2020/08/24 · openalex publication_date 2021/02/22 · arxiv updated 2021/02/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
The advent of the quantum gas microscope allowed for the in situ probing of ultracold gaseous matter on an unprecedented level of spatial resolution. However, the study of phenomena on ever smaller length scales, as well as the probing of three-dimensional systems, is fundamentally limited by the wavelength of the imaging light for all techniques based on linear optics. Here, we report on a high-resolution ion microscope as a versatile and powerful experimental tool to investigate quantum gases. The instrument clearly resolves atoms in an optical lattice with a spacing of 532 nm over a field of view of 50 sites and offers an extremely large depth of field on the order of at least 70 m. With a simple model, we extract an upper limit for the achievable resolution of approximately 200 nm from our data. We demonstrate a pulsed operation mode enabling 3D imaging and allowing for the study of ionic impurities and Rydberg physics.