Nondestructive characterization of laser-cooled atoms using machine learning

We develop machine learning techniques for estimating physical properties of laser-cooled potassium-39 atoms in a magneto-optical trap using only the scattered light – i.e., fluorescence – that is intrinsic to the cooling process. In-situ snap-shot images of fluorescing atomic ensembles directly reveal the spatial structure of these millimeter-scale objects but contain no obvious information regarding internal properties such as the temperature. We first assembled and labeled a balanced dataset sampling $8\times {10}^3$ different experimental parameters that includes examples with: large and dense atomic ensembles, a complete absence of atoms, and everything in between. We describe a range of models trained to predict atom number and temperature solely from fluorescence images. These run the gamut from a poorly performing linear regression model based only on integrated fluorescence to deep neural networks that give number and temperature with fractional uncertainties of $0.1$ and $0.2$ respectively.