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April 23 (UPI) – Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have successfully built a cascading silicon pea shooter – a smaller, more accurate atomic beam collimator.
The technology could be used to produce exotic quantum phenomena so that scientists can study or improve devices such as atomic clocks or accelerometers, a component of a smartphone.
"A typical device that you could build with this is a new generation gyroscope for a GPS-independent precision navigation system that can be used when you're out of range of the satellite in a remote area or traveling in a remote location. "Space," Chandra Raman, an associate professor of physics at Georgia Tech, said in a press release.
Atomic beam collimators have a box of atoms, usually rubidium atoms. Once heated, the atoms begin to rebound energetically. A tube connected to the box allows the atoms to bounce on the right trajectory to escape.
The atoms bounce into the tube and are projected to the end of the barrel as a lead coming from a shotgun. And like the shotgun of a shotgun, the atoms form a random stream.
"Collimated atomic beams have been around for decades," said Raman, "but currently, the collimators must be bulky to be precise."
The researchers were able to reduce the technology to the size of a chip by cutting narrow channels on a silicon wafer using lithography, a technique used for burning computer chips. The channels function as a miniature array of shotgun barrels that all point in the same direction. The tiny channels can project a precise set of atoms.
To make the picture even more accurate, scientists have cut a pair of tiny gaps across the channels. The atoms that bounce at a more off-set angle exit the channels, while the parallel atoms continue their straight trajectory at the end of the barrel.
Unlike a laser beam, composed of photons without mass, a beam of atoms produced by the collimator has a mass and therefore also has the impulse and the inertia. This allows the use of the technology in gyroscopes, which are used to measure movement and location changes.
Current chip scale gyroscopes rely on microelectromechanical systems, which are accurate in the short term but become less accurate over time – or "drifts" as they accumulate deformations due to mechanical stresses.
"To eliminate this drift, you need an absolutely stable mechanism," said Farrokh Ayazi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech. "This atomic beam creates this kind of reference on a chip."
The researchers suggest that the new collimated atom beam at the scale of a chip – described this week in the journal Nature Communications – could be used to create Rydberg atoms. When atoms are excited by heat, their outermost electron expands its orbit. The electron behaves like the only electron of a hydrogen atom, while the atom of Rydberg acts as if it had only one proton.
"You can create certain types of multi-atom quantum entanglement using Rydberg states because atoms interact much more strongly than two atoms in the ground state," Raman said.
"Rydberg's atoms could also advance future sensor technologies as they are sensitive to current fluxes or in electronic fields smaller than an electron's size," Ayazi said. "They could also be used in the processing of quantum information."
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