There has recently been growing interest in integrating and miniaturizing vapour cells to reduce cost, size and power consumption. Hereby we provide a new paradigm in chip-scale-integrated vapour cells by experimentally demonstrating the nanoatomic suspended waveguide, which introduces a nanoscale silicon nitride waveguide suspended in rubidium vapour. By doing so, the properties of the optical modes and the light–vapour interactions are controlled by the waveguide dimensions and can be tailored precisely for specific applications. Compared with previously published atomic cladded waveguides, our new device allows for a substantial reduction of Doppler and transit time broadening and improves the vapour coherence time. Furthermore, it practically eliminates the van der Waals shift and drastically reduces the light shift by two orders of magnitude. We have shown the usefulness of the device as a frequency reference with instability below 50 kHz. The demonstrated approach could also be used for other diverse applications that benefit from accurate and precise light–vapour applications, for example, magnetometry, quantum storage, atomic clocks, high-spatial-resolution field sensors and all-optical switching.

最近，人们对集成和小型化蒸汽电池以降低成本、尺寸和功耗的兴趣日益浓厚。因此，我们通过实验证明纳米原子悬浮波导提供了芯片级集成蒸气电池的新范例，该波导引入了悬浮在铷蒸气中的纳米级氮化硅波导。通过这样做，光学模式的特性和光-蒸汽相互作用由波导尺寸控制，并且可以针对特定应用进行精确定制。与之前发表的原子包层波导相比，我们的新器件可以显着减少多普勒和传输时间展宽，并改善蒸汽相干时间。此外，它实际上消除了范德华位移，并将光位移大大降低了两个数量级。我们已经展示了该设备作为频率参考的有用性，其不稳定性低于 50 kHz。所展示的方法还可用于其他受益于准确和精确的光蒸汽应用的各种应用，例如磁力测量、量子存储、原子钟、高空间分辨率场传感器和全光开关。