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arXiv · 2509.17767

Hybrid Trapping of Cold Atoms with Surface Forces and Blue-Detuned Evanescent Light on a Nanophotonic Waveguide

Riccardo Pennetta·Antoine Glicenstein·Philipp Schneeweiss·Jürgen Volz·Arno Rauschenbeutel
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Abstract

We demonstrate a novel hybrid nanophotonic trap for cold neutral atoms, leveraging surface forces for attraction and blue-detuned evanescent light for repulsion. We attribute the attractive potential to a combination of Casimir-Polder interactions and electrostatic charges distributed on the waveguide surface. Despite the trap's shallow depth, we efficiently load atoms into it via adiabatic transfer from a conventional two-color dipole trap. Remarkably, the hybrid trap supports a long atomic storage time of 140(9) ms and exhibits a Ramsey coherence time of 16.8(2) ms, the latter exceeding significantly previous reports for nanophotonic systems. Our results pave the way for further exploration of atom-surface interactions at the nanoscale and illustrate the potential of harnessing surface forces to enhance storage and coherence times for atoms coupled to nanophotonic waveguides. This advancement offers new opportunities for neutral-atom quantum technologies.

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Riccardo Pennetta, Antoine Glicenstein, Philipp Schneeweiss, Jürgen Volz, Arno Rauschenbeutel. 2025-09-22. Hybrid Trapping of Cold Atoms with Surface Forces and Blue-Detuned Evanescent Light on a Nanophotonic Waveguide. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-026-01961-9

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