National Research & Development Laboratory Applications

Laser Excitation of Single Atoms

Customer Case

The client is an academic department conducting fundamental atomic physics research. The target of a Laser is a single Alkali atom, which enlarges to the size of several microns, upon receiving the pulse excitation. The enlarged atom is called a Rydberg atom and can reach the size of a grain of sand. The enlarged atom has new physical properties that are characterized by a detector that creates fast analog data streams.

The setup of the experiment involves generating femtosecond Laser pulses, and capturing a 0 to 15 Volt ramp function with a very stable baseline voltage. It is very important to capture both the high voltage part and the near zero baseline part at the same time and with a resolution of 1 milliVolt in order to detect very small sub-atomic quantum chaos interactions. The signal pulse repetition frequency is 25 kiloHertz and 500 pulses should be captured at 50 MegaSamples per second during a 20 millisecond time period of interest .

GaGe Case Solution

The CompuScope 1450 card has the speed and the resolution to capture the client’s signal. The on-board memory requirement is equal to the minimum 1 MegaSample offered.

The solution offered by GaGe is the CS1450-1M operating in single channel mode at 50 MS/s. No special clocking is required.

The required capture time is 20 ms, which will fill the 1 MS of on-board memory at 50 MS/s in Single Record Mode. Therefore, Multiple Record Mode is not required for the present setup, but was suggested for future experiments. Using Multiple Record mode, memory can be used more efficiently and a higher number of pulses can be captured.

The client already has a mainframe with LabVIEW software, so the GaGe CompuScope LabVIEW Software Development Kit enables a quick and easy implementation of this important research.

GaGe Case Recommended Products

Research & Development Application Request

We encourage you to contact us and discuss your research & development application in more detail with our engineering team. GaGe can provide tailored custom data acquisition hardware and software solutions to meet specific application requirements.