Abstract

Since the first demonstration of magnetic neutral-atom trapping with current-carrying wire patterns on a chip [1], there has been a lot of progress in the field of integrated atom traps. Several types of beam guides and splitters have been demonstrated in laboratories in Europe and the USA, and a device for atom transport and positioning with submicron precision has been realized. All these experiments have used laser-cooled samples of cold atoms, which populate many vibrational states of the magnetic potential. To realize proposed schemes for quantum computing with trapped neutral atoms, it is necessessaxy to use individual atoms in well-defined vibrational states, or possibly condensed ensembles [2].

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