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arXiv:1909.08894 · Physical Review A

Ground-state cooling of a single atom inside a high-bandwidth cavity

Eduardo Uruñuela, Wolfgang Alt, Elvira Keiler, Dieter Meschede, Deepak Pandey, Hannes Pfeifer, Tobias Macha

Published Feb 28, 2020• 6 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report on vibrational ground-state cooling of a single neutral atom coupled to a high-bandwidth Fabry-P\'erot cavity. The cooling process relies on degenerate Raman sideband transitions driven by dipole trap beams, which confine the atoms in three dimensions. We infer a one-dimensional motional ground-state population close to $90%$ by means of Raman spectroscopy. Moreover, lifetime measurements of a cavity-coupled atom exceeding 40 s imply three-dimensional cooling of the atomic motion, which makes this resource-efficient technique particularly interesting for cavity experiments with limited optical access.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.101.023415

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We report on vibrational ground-state cooling of a single neutral atom coupled to a high-bandwidth Fabry-P'erot cavity. The cooling process relies on degenerate Raman sideband transitions driven by dipole trap beams, which confine the atoms in three dimensions. We infer a one-dimensional motional ground-state population close to 9090%90 by means of Raman spectroscopy. Moreover, lifetime measurements of a cavity-coupled atom exceeding 40 s imply three-dimensional cooling of the atomic motion, which makes this resource-efficient technique particularly interesting for cavity experiments with limited optical access.
A single neutral atom is trapped in a three-dimensional optical lattice at the center of a high-finesse optical resonator. Using fluorescence imaging and a shiftable standing-wave trap, the atom is deterministically loaded into the maximum of the intracavity field where the atom-cavity coupling is strong. After 5 ms of Raman sideband cooling, the three-dimensional motional ground state is populated with a probability of (89±2)%. Our system is the first to simultaneously achieve quantum control over all degrees of freedom of a single atom: its position and momentum, its internal state, and its coupling to light.
We report cooling of a single neutral atom to its three-dimensional vibrational ground state in an optical tweezer.After employing Raman sideband cooling for tens of milliseconds, we measure via sideband spectroscopy a three-dimensional ground-state occupation of about 90%.We further observe coherent control of the spin and motional state of the trapped atom.Our demonstration shows that an optical tweezer, formed simply by a tightly focused beam of light, creates sufficient confinement for efficient sideband cooling.This source of ground-state neutral atoms will be instrumental in numerous quantum simulation and logic applications that require a versatile platform for storing and manipulating ultracold single neutral atoms.For example, these results will improve current optical-tweezer experiments studying atom-photon coupling and Rydberg quantum logic gates, and could provide new opportunities such as rapid production of single dipolar molecules or quantum simulation in tweezer arrays.
It was recently shown that a single atom can efficiently scatter photons out of a focused coherent light beam [1, 2, 3]. The scattering probability is strongly dependent on a thermal motion of the atom and can be maximized if the atom is well localized at a focus. To achieve that, we implement a Raman sideband cooling technique that is commonly used in ion traps [4]. Our trap, formed by focused Gaussian light beam at 980nm, has characteristic frequencies of ντ= 55 kHz and νl= 7 kHz corresponding to transverse and longitudinal confinements. A single87Rb atom is loaded into the trap from an optical molasses. Two Raman beams couple the motional states of |F = 2〉 and |F = 1〉 manifolds with a Lamb-Dicke parameter η = 0.084 (Figure 1). The Raman beams are oriented such that momentum transfer occurs only along the strong confinement of the trap with ντ= 55 kHz. The cooling sequence consists of following steps: (1) initial preparation of the atom in |F = 2,mF= −2〉 Zeeman state, (2) Raman transfer between the motional states |F = 2,mF= −2,N〉 and |F = 1,mF= −1,N − 1〉. (3) recycling the atomic population back to |F = 2,mF= −2〉 state via an optical pulse resonant to |5P3/2, F = 2〉 state thus removing a phonon via spontaneous emission.
Localization to the ground state of axial motion is demonstrated for a single, trapped atom strongly coupled to the field of a high finesse optical resonator. The axial atomic motion is cooled by way of coherent Raman transitions on the red vibrational sideband. An efficient state detection scheme enabled by strong coupling in cavity QED is used to record the Raman spectrum, from which the state of atomic motion is inferred. We find that the lowest vibrational level of the axial potential with zero-point energy variant Planck's over 2 h omega a/2kB = 13 microK is occupied with probability P0 approximately 0.95.
We experimentally realize an enhanced Raman control scheme for neutral atoms that features an intrinsic suppression of the two-photon carrier transition, but retains the sidebands which couple to the external degrees of freedom of the trapped atoms. This is achieved by trapping the atom at the node of a blue detuned standing wave dipole trap, that acts as one field for the two-photon Raman coupling. The improved ratio between cooling and heating processes in this configuration enables a five times lower fundamental temperature limit for resolved sideband cooling. We apply this method to perform Raman cooling to the two-dimensional vibrational ground state and to coherently manipulate the atomic motion. The presented scheme requires minimal additional resources and can be applied to experiments with challenging optical access, as we demonstrate by our implementation for atoms strongly coupled to an optical cavity.
Optical dipole traps can provide strong, state-independent confinement of atoms. Unfortunately, the spatially dependent light shifts of optical transitions in dipole traps can interfere with conventional laser cooling techniques. These limitations may be overcome by cooling trapped atoms with stimulated Raman transitions. In particular, the lights shifts of ground state sublevels can be equal, so that the Raman cooling transition is unperturbed. Cooling in the sideband limit, to the quantum ground state of motion, should be possible. We have confined {sup 85}Rb atoms in a far-detuned optical dipole trap, and indirectly measured extremely low heating rates of the trapped atoms. We have also driven velocity-sensitive stimulated Raman transitions of the trapped atoms. The high resolution of these stimulated Raman resonances should allow us to resolve the motional sidebands and to directly cool the trapped atoms.