Search

We demonstrate the first guiding of cold atoms through a 88mm long piece of photonic band gap fiber. The guiding potential is created by a far-off resonance dipole trap propagating inside the fiber with a hollow core of 12μm. We load the fiber from a dark spot 85Rb magneto-optical trap and observe a peak flux of more than 105 atoms s-1 at a velocity of 1.5m s-1. With an additional reservoir optical dipole trap, a constant atomic flux of 1.5 × 104 atoms s-1 is sustained for more than 150 ms. These results open up interesting possibilities to study nonlinear light-matter interaction in a nearly one-dimensional geometry and pave the way for guided matter wave interferometry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]