Calibrating the absorption imaging of cold atoms under high magnetic fields

Abstract: We develop a theoretical model for calibrating the absorption imaging of cold atoms under high magnetic fields. Comparing to zero or low magnetic fields, the efficiency of the absorption imaging becomes lower while it requires an additional correction factor to obtain the absolute atom number under the Beer-Lambert law. Our model is based on the rate equations and can account many experimental imperfections such as Zeeman level crossing, failures of hyperfine structures, off-resonant couplings, and low repumping efficiency, etc. Based on this method, we can precisely calculate the correction factor for atom number measurement without any empirical or fitting parameters. Meanwhile, we use a cold-atom apparatus of rubidium-85 to experimentally verify our model. Besides these, we find our work can also serve as a benchmark to measure the polarization impurity of a circular-polarized laser beam with high sensitivities. We believe this work will bring convenience for most of cold-atom experiments using absorption imaging.