A neutral chemical atom with a magnetic dipole moment can experience a force in a nonuniform magnetic field, despite having zero net electric charge. For an internal state that follows the local field adiabatically, its position-dependent Zeeman energy supplies an effective trapping potential energy.
A low-field-seeking state has increasing energy with field magnitude and can be confined near a field minimum. The atom must retain the trapped internal state: rapid changes of field direction or a vanishing splitting can permit transitions to untrapped states. The trap therefore selects both spatial motion and internal spin character. In atom-correlation experiments, releasing this trapped population provides a controlled source for time-of-flight atom detection.

Ancestors (11)

  1. Fermionic atom antibunching
  2. Pauli exclusion principle
  3. Fermion
  4. Indistinguishable particles
  5. Particle exchange operator
  6. Multiparticle quantum state
  7. Tensor product of quantum systems
  8. Quantum mechanics
  9. Branches of physics
  10. Physics
  11. Home

Incoming links (5)

View article source

Discussion (0) New discussion

There are no discussions about this article yet.

Articles by others on the same topic (0)

There are currently no matching articles.
See all articles in the same topic Create my own version