A high-flux cold-atom source utilising a grating atom chip

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) have been proposed for many applications in atom interferometry, as their coherence over long evolution times promises unprecedented sensitivity. To date, BECs can be efficiently created in devices using atom chips, but these are still complex and place high demands on size, weight and power. To further simplify these setups, we equipped an atom chip with a nano-structured diffraction-grating to derive all beams for the magneto-optical trap (MOT) from a single laser beam. Moreover, using a 2D⁺-MOT as an atomic source and a beam with uniform intensity for the grating illumination, we capture 1×10⁹ atoms in one second, cool them to 14\,μK, and demonstrate magnetic trapping using the atom chip. This is a major step towards the simplification of portable BEC devices for quantum sensing on earth and in space.