Eur. Phys. J. D (2021) 75: 148
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/s10053-021-00161-0

Regular Article - Optical Phenomena and Photonics

Layer-by-layer assembly of multilayer optical lattices: A theoretical proposal

School of Physics, Southeast University, 211189, Nanjing, China

^a leihao@seu.edu.cn

Received: 2 March 2021
Accepted: 21 April 2021
Published online: 5 May 2021

Abstract

We propose methods for synthesizing multilayer optical lattices of cold atoms in a layer-by-layer manner, to unlock the potential of optical lattices in simulating novel multilayer systems. The scheme combines compressed Gaussian beams of far red-detuned laser and an optical device with modified Michelson interferometers as key components. The compressed Gaussian beam makes possible standalone and purely two-dimensional optical lattices, which are the building blocks of target multilayer optical lattices. The modified Michelson interferometers split one compressed Gaussian beam into several beams, in a manner allowing delicate control over the vertical distances between the outgoing beams and their propagation directions. We illustrate the proposal with the displaced dice lattice, which is a trilayer lattice that maps to the dice lattice when projected to the same layer. Both the dice model and its interesting variants may be realized. We also discuss extensions to other interesting multilayer lattices such as the twisted multilayer lattices.