Abstract
We describe an experimental method to calibrate an absorption imaging system for ultracold atom clouds. Optical density profiles of an atom cloud are obtained for various probe beam intensities and are analyzed to determine the correction factor for the effective probe beam intensity directly from saturation effects. We find that the temporal shape of the probe-beam pulse needs to be taken into account for a quantitative analysis of the optical density measured in saturation absorption imaging. We show that this pulse-shape effect can lead to distortion of the density profile due to its nonlinear dependence on the optical depth.
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With α = 3.9 and β = 1, the atom number in the sample is estimated to be ≈ 5 × 107. The interparticle distance n −1/3 ≈ 2µm is larger than the wavelength λ = 589 nm, so the multi-atom effects are negligible in our experiment [14].
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Kwon, W.J., Choi, Jy. & Shin, Yi. Calibration of saturation absorption imaging of ultracold atom clouds. Journal of the Korean Physical Society 61, 1970–1974 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3938/jkps.61.1970
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3938/jkps.61.1970