Holographic Manipulation of a Cold Atomic Beam

Abstract

A method of generating an arbitrary pattern of atoms by using an interferometric technique is reported. A laser-cooled metastable Ne atomic beam in the ${1s}_{3}$ state is diffracted by a computer generated binary hologram. A black-and-white pattern is drawn on a microchannel detector with a spatial resolution exceeding $65\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{m}$ and a resolving power better than $30$.