Nanoparticle riding the hollow-core fiber loop-the-loop
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Nanoparticle riding the hollow-core fiber loop-the-loop
Title of the project: Experimental creation of non-Gaussian states of motion of levitated
nanoparticles
Name of the VDSP student(s) & image credits: Stefan Lindner & Paul Juschitz
Project supervised by: Nikolai Kiesel
About me/us: My name is Stefan Lindner and I'm a second year PhD student in the group of Nikolai Kiesel. I have done both my Bachelor's and Master's at the Faculty of physics. I have been working with levitated nanoparticles basically since my bachelor thesis and I think they are a wonderful platform for exploring a variety of different subjects in physics, but maybe most importantly I think they are incredibly cool.
Image: In this image, you can see several combined video frames of a single silica nanoparticle with a diameter of about 300nm traversing the core of a looped hollow-core photonic crystal fiber. The silica particle is trapped in a detuned optical standing wave inside this fiber, which connects an ambient pressure region (to the right of the image) to an ultra-high vacuum chamber (to the left). We use the hollow-core fiber to load our nanoparticles directly from ambient pressure into optical traps in ultra-high vacuum environments. This new particle loading method developed in our group is necessary for my PhD. project since it will allow us to trap particles at pressures where the decoherence-inducing effects of gas collisions can be neglected. The loop of the hollow-core fiber is necessary since without it the video
would not look nearly as nice.