polarizing-fibered components for compact cold atoms sensors – COFIPOL

Project COFIPOL is in line with the previous REI project « Polarizing optical fiber at 780 nm », led by the company IXFIBER and Institut d’Optique Graduate School, which allowed the development of a polarizing optical fiber working at 780 nm perfectly consistent with the specified performance. Here, the goal is to use the polarizing fiber developed by IXFIBER to make optical components needed for atom trapping, cooling and manipulation by laser, in the case of Rubidium for this study, in order to be integrated in different types of high accuracy instruments (gravimeters and accelerometers, gyroscopes, atomic clocks). Indeed, polarization quality is a critical parameter to guarantee long term performance of these systems and using polarizing fibers should allow to improve the extinction ratio of the components by several orders of magnitude. Consequently this project should lead to particularly interesting instrumental and commercial repercussions for all the partners of the project.
The goal of the project is to make 2 types of beam splitters:
- 1x2 splitters, developed by Keopsys, and based on fusion/drawing out, allowing to get a fixed coupled power
- adjustable splitters, developed by Innoptics, and based on micro-optics technics and allowing to rule the balance of the output beams power.
Components specifications and performance checking will be done by Institut d’Optique Graduate School, in collaboration with µQuanS.