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arXiv:1105.1919 · Physical Review Letters

Single Atom as a Mirror of an Optical Cavity

Gabriel Hetet, L. Slodička, Markus Hennrich, R. Blatt

Published Sep 19, 2011• 70 citations
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Abstract

By tightly focusing a laser field onto a single cold ion trapped in front of a far-distant dielectric mirror, we could observe a quantum electrodynamic effect whereby the ion behaves as the optical mirror of a Fabry-Pérot cavity. We show that the amplitude of the laser field is significantly altered due to a modification of the electromagnetic mode structure around the atom in a novel regime in which the laser intensity is already changed by the atom alone. We propose a direct application of this system as a quantum memory for single photons.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.107.133002

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We have investigated nonlinear atom optical effects which arise from atom-atom collisional interactions in a single-mode atomic Fabry-Perot cavity driven by a coherent cw atom laser beam. When the nonlinear interaction energy per single atom is small, the exact numerical solution of the master equation is well reproduced by a mean-field treatment in which quantum fluctuations are included linearizing the stochastic equations of the Positive-P representation. On the other hand, when the damping of the cavity mode is very weak and its wave-function is tightly confined in space, a regime of strong nonlinearity can be achieved. For the specific case of an incident atom laser frequency at resonance with the empty cavity, the numerical calculations predict a sort of atom blockade effect, which is a sort of atom optical analog of the well-known Coulomb blockade effect of electronic transport through microscopic structures: only one atom can occupy the cavity mode at a time and the statistical properties of the transmitted beam, being very similar to the resonance fluorescence from a single two-level system, show definitely nonclassical behaviors such as antibunching. Only at very large incident intensities, more than one atom can be simultaneously forced inside the cavity mode: in this regime, the results of the numerical calculations can be successfully interpreted using a dressed cavity model. From the formal analogy between atomic matter waves and optical light waves in nonlinear media, it follows that the same results hold for photonic systems.