A Loadlock Chamber for Cavity QED

By interfacing optical cavities with cold atoms, one can achieve strong light-matter coupling and engineer effective interactions between photons. In our group we are experimenting with many novel cavity designs, so a major technical speed bump we face is opening and baking our UHV system every time a new optical cavity is installed. We present here on a solution which obviates the large majority of the labor involved in the installation of new cavities into the vacuum system: a loadlock with a translator. The vacuum system consists of two separate chambers separated by a gate valve, one for science which never breaks vacuum (the "science" chamber), and one for opening to install new cavities (the "loadlock" chamber). Once a new cavity is installed and baked in the loadlock chamber, it is carried through the gate valve by the translator, all under UHV conditions. This enables new cavities to be installed without disturbing any of the optics for the MOT, imaging, or lattice systems, reducing the installation time by weeks. We present here on the design principles and current status of the apparatus.