Calibrating the Absorption Imaging of Cold Atoms under High Magnetic Fields

We develop a theoretical model for calibrating the absorption imaging of cold atoms under high magnetic fields. Particularly it also works when the hyperfine structure is decoupled and cannot provide good quantum numbers anymore. Compared with zero or low magnetic fields, for high magnetic fields the efficiency of the absorption imaging is lower, while an additional correction factor is required to obtain the absolute atom number under the Beer-Lambert law. Our model is based on the rate equations and can account for many experimental imperfections, such as Zeeman level crossing, off-resonant couplings, and low repumping efficiency. On the basis of 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 based on 85Rb to experimentally verify our model. In addition, we find our work can also serve as a benchmark to measure the polarization impurity of a circularly polarized laser beam with high sensitivity. We believe this work will be beneficial for most cold-atom experiments using absorption imaging.