Steerable optical tweezers for ultracold atom studies

We report on the implementation of an optical tweezer system for controlled transport of ultracold atoms along a narrow, static confinement channel. The tweezer system is based on high-efficiency acousto-optic deflectors and offers two-dimensional control over beam position. This opens up the possibility for tracking the transport channel when shuttling atomic clouds along it, forestalling atom spilling. Multiple clouds can be tracked independently by time-shared tweezer beams addressing individual sites in the channel. The deflectors are controlled using a multichannel direct digital synthesizer, which receives instructions on a submicrosecond time scale from a field-programmable gate array. Using the tweezer system, we demonstrate sequential binary splitting of an ultracold 87Rb cloud into 2(5) clouds.