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arXiv:1301.1963 · New Journal of Physics

Controlling spontaneous-emission noise in measurement-based feedback cooling of a Bose–Einstein condensate

Michael Hush, Stuart S. Szigeti, Andre R. R. Carvalho, J. J. Hope

Published Nov 27, 2013• 44 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Off-resonant optical imaging is a popular method for continuous monitoring of a Bose–Einstein condensate. However, the disturbance caused by scattered photons places a serious limitation on the lifetime of such continuously monitored condensates. In this paper, we demonstrate that a new choice of feedback control can overcome the heating effects of the measurement backaction. In particular, we show that the measurement backaction caused by off-resonant optical imaging is a multi-mode quantum-field effect, as the entire heating process is not seen in single-particle or mean-field models of the system. Simulating such continuously monitored systems is possible with the number-phase Wigner particle filter, which currently gives both the highest precision and largest timescale simulations amongst competing methods. It is a hybrid between the leading techniques for simulating non-equilibrium dynamics in condensates and particle filters for simulating high-dimensional non-Gaussian filters in the field of engineering. The new control scheme will enable long-term continuous measurement and feedback on one of the leading platforms for precision measurement and the simulation of quantum fields, allowing for the possibility of single-shot experiments, adaptive measurements and robust state-preparation and manipulation.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/15/11/113060

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Off-resonant optical imaging is a popular method for continuous monitoring of a Bose–Einstein condensate. However, the disturbance caused by scattered photons places a serious limitation on the lifetime of such continuously monitored condensates. In this paper, we demonstrate that a new choice of feedback control can overcome the heating effects of the measurement backaction. In particular, we show that the measurement backaction caused by off-resonant optical imaging is a multi-mode quantum-field effect, as the entire heating process is not seen in single-particle or mean-field models of the system. Simulating such continuously monitored systems is possible with the number-phase Wigner particle filter, which currently gives both the highest precision and largest timescale simulations amongst competing methods. It is a hybrid between the leading techniques for simulating non-equilibrium dynamics in condensates and particle filters for simulating high-dimensional non-Gaussian filters in the field of engineering. The new control scheme will enable long-term continuous measurement and feedback on one of the leading platforms for precision measurement and the simulation of quantum fields, allowing for the possibility of single-shot experiments, adaptive measurements and robust state-preparation and manipulation.
We consider the theory of feedback control of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) confined in a harmonic trap under a continuous measurement constructed via nondestructive imaging. A filtering theory approach is used to derive a stochastic master equation (SME) for the system from a general Hamiltonian based upon system-bath coupling. Numerical solutions for this SME in the limit of a single atom show that the final steady-state energy is dependent upon the measurement strength, the ratio of photon kinetic energy to atomic kinetic energy, and the feedback strength. Simulations indicate that for a weak measurement strength, feedback can be used to overcome heating introduced by the scattering of light, thereby allowing the atom to be driven toward the ground state.
We apply quantum filtering and control to a particle in a harmonic trap under continuous position measurement, and show that a simple static feedback law can be used to cool the system. The final steady state is Gaussian and dependent on the feedback strength and coupling between the system and probe. In the limit of weak coupling, this final state becomes the ground state. An earlier model by Haine et al. [Phys. Rev. A 69, 13605 (2004)] without measurement backaction showed dark states: states that did not display error signals, thus remaining unaffected by the control. This paper shows that for a realistic measurement process this is not true, which indicates that a Bose-Einstein condensate may be driven toward the ground state from any arbitrary initial state.
Ultracold atomic Fermi gases are the leading platform for analogue quantum simulation, and provide a promising avenue to study the origin of high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates. However, current experimental approaches to cooling Fermi gases use evaporative cooling, which is limited by poor thermalisation properties of fermions and is non-number-conserving. This prevents the creation of useful analogue simulators of many collective phenomena. This thesis is the first theoretical investigation into the use of continuous-measurement feedback control as an alternative means of cooling an atomic Fermi gas. Since tractable simulation of Fermi gas dynamics requires simplifications to the full quantum field theory, we derive and simulate a fermionic equivalent to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, generalising a model of feedback-controlled BECs by Haine et al. to multimode ultracold atomic Fermi gases. We demonstrate that in the absence of measurement effects, a suitable control can drive an interacting Fermi gas arbitrarily close to its ground state. However, although control schemes based upon damping spatial density fluctuations work well for single-spatial-mode BECs, we show that they perform poorly for Fermi gases with a large number of atoms due to counter-oscillation of multiple spatial modes, which must exist due to Pauli exclusion. We generalise a feedback-measurement model of BECs by Szigeti et al. to a multimode atomic Fermi gas, and perform stochastic simulations of measured, feedback-controlled fermions in the single-atom and many-atom mean-field limits. The effects of measurement backaction are an important consideration, since in a realistic experiment knowledge of the system state used for feedback must be obtained from measurement, leading to competition between measurement-induced heating and feedback cooling. We show that weaker and less precise measurements cool the system to a lower equilibrium excitation energy, but are unable to place practical lower bounds on measurement strength due to the lack of a system-filter separation. When measurement-induced heating is accounted for, we find that the equilibrium energy per particle scales superlinearly, suggesting that existing control schemes which work well for bosons would not be effective for fermions. In light of this, we propose several avenues of future investigation to overcome this limitation, leaving open the possibility of feedback control of atomic Fermi gases as a pathway to analogue quantum simulation.
Abstract We theoretically investigate measurement-based feedback control over the motional degrees of freedom of an oblate quasi-2D atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) subject to continuous density monitoring. We develop a linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) model that describes the multi-mode dynamics of the condensate's collective excitations under continuous measurement and control. Crucially, the multi-mode cold-damping feedback control we consider uses a realistic state-estimation scheme that does not rely upon a particular model of the atomic dynamics. We present analytical results showing that collective excitations can be cooled to below single-phonon average occupation (ground-state cooling) across a broad parameter regime, and identify the conditions under which the lowest steady-state phonon occupation is asymptotically achieved. Further, we develop multi-objective optimization methods that explore the trade-off between cooling speed and the final energy of the cloud, and provide numerical simulations demonstrating the ground-state cooling of the lowest ten motional modes above the condensate ground state. Our investigation provides concrete guidance on the feedback control design and parameters needed to experimentally realize a feedback-cooled BEC.
Weak measurement in tandem with real-time feedback control is a new route toward engineering novel nonequilibrium quantum matter. Here we develop a theoretical toolbox for quantum feedback control of multicomponent Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) using backaction-limited weak measurements in conjunction with spatially resolved feedback. Feedback in the form of a single-particle potential can introduce effective interactions that enter into the stochastic equation governing system dynamics. The effective interactions are tunable and can be made analogous to Feshbach resonances-spin independent and spin dependent-but without changing atomic scattering parameters. Feedback cooling prevents runaway heating due to measurement backaction and we present an analytical model to explain its effectiveness. We showcase our toolbox by studying a two-component BEC using a stochastic mean-field theory, where feedback induces a phase transition between easy-axis ferromagnet and spin-disordered paramagnet phases. We present the steady-state phase diagram as a function of intrinsic and effective spin-dependent interaction strengths. Our result demonstrates that closed-loop quantum control of Bose-Einstein condensates is a powerful tool for quantum engineering in cold-atom systems.
Degenerate quantum gases are instrumental in advancing many-body quantum physics and underpin emerging precision sensing technologies. All state-of-the-art experiments use evaporative cooling to achieve the ultracold temperatures needed for quantum degeneracy, yet evaporative cooling is extremely lossy: more than 99.9% of the gas is discarded. Such final particle number limitations constrain imaging resolution, gas lifetime, and applications leveraging macroscopic quantum coherence. Here we show that atomic Bose gases can be cooled to quantum degeneracy using real-time feedback, an entirely new method that does not suffer the same limitations as evaporative cooling. Through novel quantum-field simulations and scaling arguments, we demonstrate that an initial low-condensate-fraction thermal Bose gas can be cooled to a high-purity Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) by feedback control, with substantially lower atomic loss than evaporative cooling. Advantages of feedback cooling are found to be robust to imperfect detection, finite resolution of the control and measurement, time delay in the control loop, and spontaneous emission. Using feedback cooling to create degenerate sources with high coherence and low entropy enables new capabilities in precision measurement, atomtronics, and few- and many-body quantum physics.