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arXiv:2010.09118 · Physical Review A

Sub-Poissonian atom-number distributions by means of Rydberg dressing and electromagnetically induced transparency

Daniel Cano

Published Oct 12, 2020• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A method is proposed to produce atomic ensembles with sub-Poissonian atom-number distributions. The method consists of removing the excess atoms using the interatomic interactions induced by Rydberg dressing. The selective removal of atoms occurs via spontaneous decay into untrapped states using an electromagnetically induced transparency scheme. Ensembles with the desired number of atoms can be produced almost deterministically. Numerical simulations predict a strong reduction of the atom-number fluctuations, with the variance 20 times less than the Poisson noise level (the predicted Fano factor is $F\ensuremath{\simeq}0.05$). Strikingly, the method is suitable for both fermions and bosons. It solves the problem of the atom-number fluctuations in bosons, whose weak interactions have usually been an obstacle to controlling the number of atoms.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.102.043103

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•Jul 3, 2016•0 citations
A method is proposed to produce atomic ensembles with sub-Poissonian atom-number distributions. The method consists of removing the excess atoms using the interatomic interactions induced by Rydberg dressing. The selective removal of atoms occurs via spontaneous decay into untrapped states using an electromagnetically induced transparency scheme. Ensembles with the desired number of atoms can be produced almost deterministically. Numerical simulations predict a strong reduction of the atom-number fluctuations, with the variance 20 times less than the Poisson noise level (the predicted Fano factor is F\ensuremath≃0.05F\ensuremath{\simeq}0.05F\ensuremath≃0.05). Strikingly, the method is suitable for both fermions and bosons. It solves the problem of the atom-number fluctuations in bosons, whose weak interactions have usually been an obstacle to controlling the number of atoms.
We investigate experimentally the number statistics of a mesoscopic ensemble of cold atoms in a microscopic dipole trap loaded from a magneto-optical trap and find that the atom-number fluctuations are reduced with respect to a Poisson distribution due to light-assisted two-body collisions. For numbers of atoms $N\ensuremath{\gtrsim}2$, we measure a reduction factor (Fano factor) of $0.72\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.07$, which differs from 1 by more than four standard deviations. We analyze this fact by a general stochastic model describing the competition between the loading of the trap from a reservoir of cold atoms and multiatom losses, leading to a master equation. Applied to our experimental regime, this model indicates an asymptotic value of 3/43/43/4 for the Fano factor at large NNN and in the steady state. We thus show that we have reached the ultimate level of reduction in number fluctuations in our system.
We show that three-body loss of trapped atoms leads to sub-Poissonian atom-number fluctuations. We prepare hundreds of dense ultracold ensembles in an array of magnetic microtraps which undergo rapid three-body decay. The shot-to-shot fluctuations of the number of atoms per trap are sub-Poissonian, for ensembles comprising 50-300 atoms. The measured relative variance or Fano factor F=0.53+/-0.22 agrees very well with the prediction by an analytic theory (F=3/5) and numerical calculations. These results will facilitate studies of quantum information science with mesoscopic ensembles.
We develop an approach to generate finite-range atomic interactions via optical Rydberg-state excitation and study the underlying excitation dynamics in theory and experiment. In contrast to previous work, the proposed scheme is based on resonant optical driving and the establishment of a dark state under conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). Analyzing the driven dissipative dynamics of the atomic gas, we show that the interplay between coherent light coupling, radiative decay, and strong Rydberg-Rydberg atom interactions leads to the emergence of sizable effective interactions while providing remarkably long coherence times. The latter are studied experimentally in a cold gas of strontium atoms for which the proposed scheme is most efficient. Our measured atom loss is in agreement with the theoretical prediction based on binary effective interactions between the driven atoms.
We report on the creation of an array of spin-squeezed ensembles of cesium atoms via Rydberg dressing, a technique that offers optical control over local interactions between neutral atoms. We optimize the coherence of the interactions by a stroboscopic dressing sequence that suppresses super-Poissonian loss. We thereby prepare squeezed states of N=200 atoms with a metrological squeezing parameter ξ^{2}=0.77(9) quantifying the reduction in phase variance below the standard quantum limit. We realize metrological gain across three spatially separated ensembles in parallel, with the strength of squeezing controlled by the local intensity of the dressing light. Our method can be applied to enhance the precision of tests of fundamental physics based on arrays of atomic clocks and to enable quantum-enhanced imaging of electromagnetic fields.
A three-level atomic medium can be made transparent to a resonant probe field in the presence of a strong control field acting on an adjacent atomic transition. We show that long-range dipole-dipole exchange interaction with one or more spins -- two-level systems represented by atoms in suitable Rydberg states -- can play the role of control field for the optically-dense medium of atoms. This induces transparency of the medium for a number of probe photons npn_pnp​ not exceeding the number of spins nsn_sns​, while all the excess photons are resonantly absorbed upon propagation. In the case of a single spin atom prepared in the Rydberg state, the medium is thus transparent only to a single input probe photon. For larger number of spins nsn_sns​, all np≤nsn_p \leq n_snp​≤ns​ photon components of the probe field experience transparency but with an npn_pnp​-dependent group velocity.