Abstract

An atom-fiber waveguide, a concept first proposed by Ol' Shami et al¹ uses ponderamotive forces induced by laser light in a hollow optical fiber to contain atoms within the fibers' hollow core. When the laser is tuned to the red of an atomic resonance, atoms are attracted to high intensity regions of the field and contained transversely in a hollow fiber core if the guide field is maximum along the axis. Axial atom propagation is unconstrained. Atoms guided in this way propagate by a series of specular reflections from the potential walls, similar to the guiding of light in a multimode fiber.

© 1995 Optical Society of America