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arXiv:2010.07267 · Physical Review Letters

Coupling a Single Trapped Atom to a Whispering-Gallery-Mode Microresonator

Elisa Will, Luke Masters, Arno Rauschenbeutel, Michael Scheucher, Jürgen Volz

Published Jun 11, 2021• 69 citations
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Abstract

We demonstrate trapping of a single ^{85}Rb atom at a distance of about 200 nm from the surface of a whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonator. The atom is trapped in an optical potential, which is created by retroreflecting a red-detuned focused laser beam from the resonator surface. We counteract the trap-induced light shift of the atomic transition frequency by superposing a second laser beam. This allows us to observe a vacuum Rabi splitting in the excitation spectrum of the coupled atom-resonator system. This first demonstration of stable and controlled interaction of a single atom with a whispering-gallery mode in the strong coupling regime opens up the route toward the implementation of quantum protocols and applications that harvest the chiral atom-light coupling present in this class of resonators.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.126.233602

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We demonstrate trapping of a single ^{85}Rb atom at a distance of about 200 nm from the surface of a whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonator. The atom is trapped in an optical potential, which is created by retroreflecting a red-detuned focused laser beam from the resonator surface. We counteract the trap-induced light shift of the atomic transition frequency by superposing a second laser beam. This allows us to observe a vacuum Rabi splitting in the excitation spectrum of the coupled atom-resonator system. This first demonstration of stable and controlled interaction of a single atom with a whispering-gallery mode in the strong coupling regime opens up the route toward the implementation of quantum protocols and applications that harvest the chiral atom-light coupling present in this class of resonators.
We demonstrate highly efficient switching of optical signals between two optical fibers controlled by a single atom.The key element of our experiment is a whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonator, which is coupled to a single atom and interfaced by two tapered fiber couplers.This system reaches the strong coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics, leading to a vacuum Rabi splitting in the excitation spectrum.We systematically investigate the switching efficiency of our system, i.e., the probability that the fiber-optical switch redirects the light into the desired output.We obtain a large redirection efficiency reaching a raw fidelity of more than 60% without postselection.Moreover, by measuring the second-order correlation functions of the output fields, we show that our switch exhibits a photon-number-dependent routing capability.
Whispering gallery modes of a microdisk resonator are useful for the optical detection of single rubidium and cesium atoms near the surface of a substrate. Light is coupled into two high-Q whispering-gallery modes of the disk which can provide attractive and/or repulsive potentials, respectively, via their evanescent fields. The sum potential, including van der Waals/Casimir-Polder surface forces, may be tuned to exhibit a minimum at distances on the order of 100 nm from the disk surface. Simultaneously optically trapping and detecting is possible, with the back-action of an atom held in this trap on the light fields being suffciently strong to provide a measurable effect. Atom trapping and detection depend on a variety of system parameters and experimental realizations differ for different atoms.
We demonstrate an efficient optical guiding technique for coupling cold atoms in the near field of a planar nanophotonic circuit, and realize large atom-photon coupling to a whispering-gallery mode in a microring resonator with a single-atom cooperativity C≳8. The guiding potential is created by diffracted light on a nanophotonic waveguide that smoothly connects to a dipole trap in the far field for atom guiding with subwavelength precision. We observe atom-induced transparency for light coupled to a microring, characterize the atom-photon coupling rate, extract guided atom flux, and demonstrate on-chip photon routing by single atoms. Our demonstration promises new applications with cold atoms on a nanophotonic circuit for chiral quantum optics and quantum technologies.
We demonstrate highly efficient switching of optical signals between two optical fibers controlled by a single atom. The key element of our experiment is a whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonator, which is coupled to a single atom and interfaced by two tapered fiber couplers. This system reaches the strong coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics, leading to a vacuum Rabi splitting in the excitation spectrum. We systematically investigate the switching efficiency of our system, i.e., the probability that the fiber-optical switch redirects the light into the desired output. We obtain a large redirection efficiency reaching a raw fidelity of more than 60% without postselection. Moreover, by measuring the second-order correlation functions of the output fields, we show that our switch exhibits a photon-number-dependent routing capability.
We investigate simultaneous optical trapping and optical detection of a single Rb atom near the surface of a toroidal microdisk. Light is coupled into two high-Q whispering-gallery modes of the disk which provide attractive and repulsive potentials, respectively, via their evanescent fields. The sum potential including van-der-Waals and Casimir-Polder surface forces exhibits a minimum at distances of the order of 100 nm from the disk surface. The back-action of an atom held in this trap on the light fields is sufficiently strong to provide a measurable effect. We discuss atom trapping and detection properties in dependence on a variety of system parameters.
Here we demonstrate the experimental realization of a fiber-integrated optical circulator whose operation direction is controlled by the quantum state of a single atom. The device is based on a bottle whispering-gallery-mode microresonator interfaced by two optical nanofibers. Depending on its internal state, the single atom couples differently to the chiral resonator fields. This results in a direction dependent transmission through the resonator and thus realizes an optical circulator. The demonstrated quantum optical circulator opens new ways for routing and processing quantum information in optical circuits.