We present the design and assembly of a cavity microscope for quantum simulations with ultracold atoms. The system integrates a high-finesse optical cavity with a pair of high-numerical aperture lenses sharing a common optical axis, enabling simultaneous operation with light close-to-atomic resonance. The system keeps the advantages of a rigid, single-block structure holding the lenses and cavity together, and improves over existing designs by using most of the solid angle left free by the cavity mode for imaging and atomic manipulation purposes. The cavity has a length of 19.786 mm, a finesse of 2.35 × 10 4 and operates 214 µm away from the concentric limit, deep in the strong coupling regime. The two lenses offer a numerical aperture of 0.52 each and maximal optical access in all directions transverse to the cavity axis, compatible with applications in quantum-gas microscopes, micro-tweezer arrays or few-fermions systems, as well as future cavity-assisted quantum simulation protocols demanding sub-cavity-mode control of the atom-cavity coupling.
We present the design and assembly of a cavity microscope for quantum simulations with ultracold atoms. The system integrates a high-finesse optical cavity with a pair of high-numerical aperture lenses sharing a common optical axis, enabling simultaneous operation with light close-to-atomic resonance. The system keeps the advantages of a rigid, single-block structure holding the lenses and cavity together, and improves over existing designs by using most of the solid angle left free by the cavity mode for imaging and atomic manipulation purposes. The cavity has a length of 19.786 mm, a finesse of 2.35 × 10 4 and operates 214 µm away from the concentric limit, deep in the strong coupling regime. The two lenses offer a numerical aperture of 0.52 each and maximal optical access in all directions transverse to the cavity axis, compatible with applications in quantum-gas microscopes, micro-tweezer arrays or few-fermions systems, as well as future cavity-assisted quantum simulation protocols demanding sub-cavity-mode control of the atom-cavity coupling.
We report a high-finesse bow-tie cavity designed for atomic physics experiments with Rydberg atom arrays. The cavity has a finesse of 51,000 and a waist of 7.1 μm at the cesium D2 line (852 nm). With these parameters, the cavity is expected to induce strong coupling between a single atom and a single photon, corresponding to a cooperativity per traveling mode of 35 at the cavity waist. To trap and image atoms, the cavity setup utilizes two in-vacuum aspheric lenses with a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.35 and is capable of housing NA = 0.5 microscope objectives. In addition, the large atom-mirror distance (≳1.5 cm) provides good optical access and minimizes stray electric fields at the position of the atoms. This cavity setup can operate in tandem with a Rydberg array platform, creating a fully connected system for quantum simulation and computation.
Motivated to develop quantum technologies and to study ever-more complex quantum systems,scientists are developing increasingly sophisticated experimental tools to control and\nmeasure quantum samples such as ensembles of ultracold atoms. A high-finesse optical\ncavity can be used to measure the state of atoms within its photonic mode with precision\nlimited only by quantum uncertainty. Such a cavity can also be used to mediate interactions\nbetween different atoms within the cavity mode. High-resolution microscope objectives have\nbeen interfaced with ultracold atom experiments to allow researchers to image single atoms\nwithin optical lattices, to trap single atoms in microtweezer arrays, and to imprint arbitrary\noptical patterns onto atomic ensembles. Among other applications, these technologies have\nallowed researchers to investigate many-body quantum systems, engineer novel interactions,\nand realize high-fidelity quantum operations.This dissertation presents the details of the design, construction, and operation of a new, versatileatomic physics apparatus that combines these two experimental tools. The apparatus\nincludes a high-finesse optical cavity into which atoms are optically transported. In addition,\nthere is a high-numerical-aperture objective aligned to image, with micron-scale resolution,\natoms trapped within the center of the optical cavity. We present results demonstrating\nthe capability of this apparatus to deliver and study ultracold atomic samples, ranging from\nsingle atoms to Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate a dispersive shift of the cavity\nresonance due to the presence of atoms in the cavity mode and the trapping and imaging of\nsingle atoms in optical microtweezers. We also present an atomic scanning probe microscopy\ntechnique with which a single atom in a microtweezer is used to map out the spatial amplitude\npattern of an optical cavity mode standing wave by monitoring the position-dependent\nscattering properties of the atom.
From fundamental studies of light-matter interaction to applications in quantum networking and sensing, cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) provides a platform-crossing toolbox to control interactions between atoms and photons. The coherence of such interactions is determined by the product of the single-pass atomic absorption and the number of photon round-trips. Reducing the cavity loss has enabled resonators supporting nearly 1-million optical roundtrips at the expense of severely limited optical material choices and increased alignment sensitivity. The single-pass absorption probability can be increased through the use of near-concentric, fiber or nanophotonic cavities, which reduce the mode waists at the expense of constrained optical access and exposure to surface fields. Here we present a new high numerical-aperture, lens-based resonator that pushes the single-atom-single-photon absorption probability per round trip close to its fundamental limit by reducing the mode size at the atom below a micron while keeping the atom mm-to-cm away from all optics. This resonator provides strong light-matter coupling in a cavity where the light circulates only ~ 10 times. We load a single 87Rb atom into such a cavity, observe strong coupling, demonstrate cavity-enhanced atom detection with imaging fidelity of 99.55(6) percent and survival probability of 99.89(4) percent in 130 microseconds, and leverage this new platform for a time-resolved exploration of cavity cooling. The resonator's loss-resilience paves the way to coupling of atoms to nonlinear and adaptive optical elements and provides a minimally invasive route to readout of defect centers. Introduction of intra-cavity imaging systems will enable the creation of cavity arrays compatible with Rydberg atom array computing technologies, vastly expanding the applicability of the cavity QED toolbox.
Cavity quantum electrodynamics offers the possibility of observing and controlling the motion of a few or individual atoms, enabling the realization of various quantum technological tasks such as quantum enhanced metrology or quantum simulation of strongly correlated matter. A core limitation of these experiments lies in the mode structure of the cavity field, which is hard coded in the shape and geometry of the mirrors. As a result, most applications of cavity QED trade spatial resolution for enhanced sensitivity. Here, we propose and demonstrate a cavity-microscope device capable of controlling in space and time the coupling between atoms and light in a single-mode high-finesse cavity, reaching a spatial resolution an order of magnitude lower than the cavity-mode waist. This is achieved through local Floquet engineering of the atomic level structure, imprinting a corresponding atom-field coupling. We illustrate this capability by engineering micrometer-scale coupling, using cavity-assisted atomic measurements and optimization. Our system forms an optical device with a single optical axis, has the same footprint and complexity as a standard Fabry-Perot cavity or confocal lens pair, and can be used for any atomic species. This technique opens a wide range of perspectives, from ultrafast cavity-enhanced midcircuit readout to the quantum simulation of fully connected models of quantum matter such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Cavity quantum electrodynamic system with strongly coupled single atoms provides a good platform for studying quantum information processing, quantum simulation, quantum network, and distributed quantum computing. Cooling and trapping single atoms is a crucial technique in the quantum technology. At present, in a high-finesse cavity with finite space, cooling and trapping single atoms is a big challenge, even though it is a mature technique for free space. Great efforts have been made to cool and trap single atoms inside a cavity, and for a trapped atom its lifetime has reached as long as tens of seconds. Developing a more flexible method of cooling and trapping single atoms in a cavity is still essential for a strongly coupled cavity quantum electrodynamic system. In this work, we demonstrate experimentally that a single cesium atom in a cavity can be trapped by utilizing a single optical tweezer settled in cavity mode, and its lifetime is (2.60 ± 0.18) s. The experiment is carried out in a Fabry-Perot cavity, which is assembled by two concave mirrors each with a curvature radius of 100 mm, and cavity length of 335 μm. The concave surfaces are highly reflective, and the cavity has a finesse of 6.1 × 104. The 1080 nm optical tweezer with a waist of 2 μm is formed by an achromatic lens group with a numerical aperture of 0.4. At first, the precooled atomic assemble released from the magneto-optical trap (MOT) is transferred into cavity mode by an optical dipole trap with a waist of 36 μm. Then, one of the successfully transferred atoms is captured by the optical tweezer with the aid of cavity cooling mechanism. A blue detuned cavity locking laser is used as a standing-wave optical trap along the cavity axis. The signal of successfully trapped one atom is obtained by recording transmission of the cavity that will decrease owing to the strong coupling induced vacuum Rabi splitting. Finally, we demonstrate the precise manipulation of the atom-cavity coupling strength, which is achieved by scanning the position of the trapped atom step by step by using a high-precision translation stage. The system realized in this work can be used to study the dynamics of single atom-photon interactions with adjustable coupling strength. In addition, the mechanism adopted in this work is compatible with constructing tweezer arrays inside cavity mode, and thus possesses more flexibility and great potentials in cavity-based quantum entanglement and quantum simulation.
Neutral-atom array and cavity quantum electrodynamics offer complementary strengths for quantum science: scalable, reconfigurable qubit architectures and strong coherent light-matter coupling. Combining them in a single platform requires an optical cavity with simultaneously high cooperativity, sufficient mode volume to accommodate atom array, and ample side optical access for atom trapping, imaging, cooling, and rearrangement, a combination that is challenging to achieve. Here we realize an atomic array integrated with a millimeter-scale Fabry--Pérot cavity whose optically-characterized single-atom cooperativity reaches ηcav=125±13. Atom-cavity transmission spectra of trapped atoms yield an effective spectroscopic cooperativity ηspec=106±3, providing an in-situ verification of strong coupling in the integrated platform. In this integrated system, we achieve a state-measurement fidelity of 99.925−18+15% for a single atom with a 4-μs readout time. We also demonstrate simultaneous coupling of up to 21 individually trapped atoms to the antinode of the cavity mode. The key technical advance is a two-step mirror-fabrication method combining precision mechanical shaping and carbon-dioxide laser polishing, which produces concave fused-silica mirrors with sub-millimeter radii of curvature and residual roughness below 2A˚. Our results establish a regime of cavity-integrated atomic array that simultaneously provides high cooperativity, large mode volume, and flexible manipulation of individual atoms, opening opportunities for cavity-assisted quantum state readout and long-range entanglement-engineering in atom-array platforms.