Generation of a cold atom beam from a pyramidal magneto-optical trap

Summary form only given. A simple and robust design has been implemented based on the pyramidal trap geometry which allows use of single large diameter (/spl les/20 cm) laser beam to obtain large capture rates of atoms from the background vapor. The four 45/spl deg/ mirrors are truncated just before the apex of the pyramid, and the 1 cm/sup 2/ region at the center of the incident laser beam is retro-reflected by a /spl lambda//4 plate with a high-reflectance gold coating on the second surface. A small (1 mm diameter) hole in this retro-optic forms an extraction column for the atoms while maintaining a low conductance between the source region and an adjacent UHV chamber. The characterization of this large pyramidal low-velocity intense source (LVIS) is reported, including an investigation of scaling to very large (/spl ges/10 cm) high power (/spl sim/1 W) laser beams which should allow an improvement by a factor of 2-3 in beam flux over previous reports.