A new paper of the QuiC team has just been accepted at Appl. Phys. B:

Electron beam driven alkali metal atom source for loading a magneto-optical trap in a cryogenic environment

Stefan Haslinger, Robert Amsüss, Christian Koller, Christian Hufnagel, Nils Lippok, Johannes Majer, Jose Verdu, Stephan Schneider, and Jörg Schmiedmayer

arXiv:1003.5144,  Applied Physics B: accepted

We present a versatile and compact electron beam driven source for alkali metal atoms, which can
be implemented in cryostats. With a heat load of less than 10mW, the heat dissipation normalized
to the atoms loaded into the magneto-optical Trap (MOT), is about a factor 1000 smaller than
for a typical alkali metal dispenser. The measured linear scaling of the MOT loading rate with
electron current observed in the experiments, indicates that electron stimulated desorption is the
corresponding mechanism to release the atoms.