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Probing atom-surface interactions from tunneling-time measurements via rotation transport on an atom chip

J-B. Gerent1,*, R. Veyron2, V. Mancois3,4, R. Huang5, E. Beraud5, and S. Bernon5,†

  • *Contact author: jean-baptiste.gerent@institutoptique.fr
  • †Contact author: simon.bernon@institutoptique.fr
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 033289 – Published 8 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/qcq3-c6ph

Abstract

We propose a method to measure the interaction between an ultracold gas of neutral atoms and a surface. This solution combines an optical dipole trap reflected by the surface, a magnetic trap formed by current carrying wires embedded below the surface, and a rotation of the surface itself. It allows to adiabatically transport a Rb87 Bose-Einstein condensate from few micrometers to few hundred nanometers of the surface. At such distances, atom-surface interaction strongly affects the trapping potential, causing an increase of the tunneling rate toward the surface. In this paper, we show that the measurement of the lifetime of the cloud and its comparison to a tunneling model will allow to extract the Casimir-Polder force coefficient in the retarded regime (c4). Our model includes noise-induced heating, calibration biases of experimentally controlled parameters, and accuracy of the atom lifetime measurement. Using typical trapping parameters and experimental uncertainties, we numerically estimate the relative uncertainty of c4 to be 10%. This method can be implemented with any atomic species that can be magnetically and optically trapped.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 033289– Published 8 September, 2026
  • Received 26 February 2026
  • Accepted 10 August 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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