We demonstrate a simple stacked scheme that enables absorption imaging through a hole in the surface of a grating magneto-optical trap (GMOT) chip, placed immediately below a micro-fabricated vacuum cell. The imaging scheme is capable of overcoming the reduced optical access and surface scatter that is associated with this chip-scale platform while further permitting both trapping and imaging of the atoms from a single incident laser beam. The through-hole imaging is used to characterize the impact of the reduced optical overlap volume of the GMOT in the chip-scale cell, with an outlook to an optimized atom number in low volume systems.
Alan Bregazzi, Paul F. Griffin, Aidan S. Arnold, David P. Burt, Gabriela Martinez, Rodolphe Boudot, John Kitching, Erling Riis, James P. McGilligan
