LiveAtom is a modeling and design tool for physicists and engineers working with cold atoms. LiveAtom facilitates the design, fabrication, and use of coldatom systems by allowing users to quickly and accurately understand and visualize the behavior of these complex systems. Once users have specified an initial design, LiveAtom makes it easy to evaluate, refine, and improve the system interactively.
In addition to traditional one and two dimensional plots, LiveAtom allows users to see the magnetic fields that result from their experimental setup in three dimensions, offering a quick and intuitive way to see all of the relevant features. Lower dimensional plots provide insight only into the regions that are plotted, and can be misleading when features do not remain in one plane. All of LiveAtom's visualizations are interactive, allowing users to better see the subtleties of the magnetic field by rotating, zooming, and moving plots through the region of interest.
LiveAtom allows users to define system geometry in two ways: for quick layout and results, there are infinitely thin, 1D wires; for more complicated geometries and situations where accuracy is critical, use 2D wires. LiveAtom performs finite element analysis to determine how the currents flow through these wires. Once a conductor geometry is specified, users specify and change how current sources are attached, and how currents vary over time.
LiveAtom is more than just a visualization tool; it will perform relevant physics calculations. The tool will find any traps resulting from the conductor geometry and the values of their key properties -- trap frequency, depth, axes, etc.. The tool will model the loading of these traps with atoms in a static equilibrium, or, if the system is designed to vary over time LiveAtom will simulate how thermal atoms will behave using Monte Carlo simulation methods.
