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Simulate cold atoms with rust.

Paper out now onarxiv

NOTE: Work is ongoing to change the backend from specs to bevy - see thebevy branch andthis issue for details! You can also run a number of demos from the bevy branch in your browserhere.

atomecs is a rust crate for simulating ultracold atom experiments. It supports numerous features:

• Laser-cooling of atoms by optical scattering forces.
• Doppler forces on atoms that scatter light, including the random fluctuations that give rise to the Doppler temperature limit.
• Magnetic fields, implemented on a grid or through simple analytical models.
• Hot atoms generated by an oven.
• Hot atoms generated on the surface of a simulation volume (eg, to simulate thermal vapor in a chamber).
• Cooling light beams, defined by their detuning and gaussian intensity profiles.
• Volumes that define bounds for the simulation.
• File output in binary or text format.
• Thorough unit testing to ensure simulation results are correct.
• Good parallel performance on modern multi-core CPUs.
• Simulations can be wrapped using python/matlab, as shown in thesource_optimisation_example or thematlab examples.
• Optical dipole force traps.
• Confinement of atoms by magnetic fields, e.g. quadrupole and TOP traps.

Instructions for installing rust can be found on therust website, which includes the rust toolchain andcargo command line tool.

After cloning this repository using git, you can run examples using thecargo command line tool, e.g.cargo run --release --example 1d_mot.Thematlab examples show how to load and plot simulation results.

You can build the program documentation usingcargo doc.

atomecs follows the data-oriented Entity-Component-System (ECS) pattern, which is implemented usingspecs.ECS is well suited to high-performance simulations, and is sufficiently flexible to accomodate changing design goals.

If you are unfamiliar with data-oriented design - for instance, if you come from an object-oriented background - it is strongly recommended that you read up before diving into the code. Some useful ECS resources are:

• Mike Acton'sGDC talk, which discusses the advantages of ECS + DOD (in the context of the Unity game engine).
• Thespecs book which describes the ECS used inatomecs.
• Although written for Unity/C#, the concepts in theUnity Entities Package Documentation are very useful to understand.

• atom-atom interactions are not implemented. Most of our current work deals with atom sources, which have low steady-state number densities, so we haven't implemented this. Results for steady-state 3D MOTs should be interpreted carefully.

Our goal is to make AtomECS user-friendly, with friendly developers! Please feel free to use the issue tracker to ask questions, or join the conversations happening within the issues.

If you would like to submit a contribution:

• Take a look at the issues page to see if there is something suitable for a new user.
• Freely develop and change your own fork.
• When a feature is finished, raise a pull request to merge your changes back into the AtomECS repository. The team will openly review your code and suggest changes/improvements.

The current developers ofatomecs are:

• Dr.Elliot Bentine, Oxford
• Dr.Tiffany Harte, Cambridge
• Xuhui Chen, Oxford
• Maurice Zeuner, Cambridge

The long term goal foratomecs is to have a complete simulation suite for cold atom experiments.If you'd like to get involved in development, please do!