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AIP conference proceedings

Measurement of the van der Waals interaction between an atom and a cavity

E. A. Hinds, Vahid Sandoghdar, Charles I. Sukenik, S. Haroche

Published Jan 1, 1993• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We have measured the energy of interaction between a sodium atom and its electrical images in the walls of a micron‐sized cavity. The atoms are centrally located between two plane parallel gold mirrors whose separation is varied from 500 nm to 2400 nm. In the smallest cavities, the atoms are held near the center by means of a one‐dimensional optical dipole trap. Energy level shifts are measured directly by laser spectroscopy of the states nS with n in the range 10–13. This cavity QED study provides the first direct, quantitative test of the Lennard‐Jones–van der Waals interaction as a function of controlled atom‐surface separation and mean square electric dipole moment.

DOI
10.1063/1.43778

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We have measured the energy of interaction between a sodium atom and its electrical images in the walls of a micron‐sized cavity. The atoms are centrally located between two plane parallel gold mirrors whose separation is varied from 500 nm to 2400 nm. In the smallest cavities, the atoms are held near the center by means of a one‐dimensional optical dipole trap. Energy level shifts are measured directly by laser spectroscopy of the states nS with n in the range 10–13. This cavity QED study provides the first direct, quantitative test of the Lennard‐Jones–van der Waals interaction as a function of controlled atom‐surface separation and mean square electric dipole moment.
We have measured the energy of interaction between a sodium atom and its electrical images in the walls of a micron‐sized cavity. The atoms are centrally located between two plane parallel gold mirrors whose separation is varied from 500 nm to 2400 nm. In the smallest cavities, the atoms are held near the center by means of a one‐dimensional optical dipole trap. Energy level shifts are measured directly by laser spectroscopy of the states nS with n in the range 10–13. This cavity QED study provides the first direct, quantitative test of the Lennard‐Jones–van der Waals interaction as a function of controlled atom‐surface separation and mean square electric dipole moment.
We have performed spectroscopy on sodium atoms that are optically channeled in the single node of a laser standing wave set up across a parallel-plate cavity. Using this technique we have extended our previous measurement of the Lennard-Jones van der Waals energy-level shift [Sandoghdar et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 3432 (1992)] down to a cavity width of \ensuremath{\sim}500 nm. We discuss the applications of this technique to the precise measurement of atom-surface distances. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
Over the past ten years, our group has investigated the effects of confinement on atoms inside metallic micron–sized cavities in order to elucidate some basic phenomena in the field of cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). The first of these was the inhibition of spontaneous emission from an atom inside a cavity. This was followed by a laser spectroscopic measurement of the van der Waals interaction between a single Rydberg atom and a gold cavity, which showed that a simple electrostatic model of the atom–cavity interaction is correct when the cavity is small enough. More recently, the retarded Casimir–Polder force was measured between a ground state sodium atom and a large cavity, demonstrating that the van der Waals potential fails at long enough range and that the vacuum fluctuations of the field then have an important role in the interaction of the atom with the cavity. Our group is now pushing forward these investigations to study cavities whose walls have losses and dispersion, where the theory of cavity QED is significantly more complicated. With real surfaces, we have to deal with the complex dielectric response ε(ω) of the material, which exhibits frequency–dependent absorption and dispersion. One particularly interesting case is when a downward transition in the atom is resonant with an excitation of the cavity walls. This opens a new branch for the atomic decay: as an alternative to creating a photon within the space surrounded by the cavity walls the atomic decay can now create an electromagnetic excitation of the walls themselves. Another novel feature of our experiments is that the Bohr frequencies of the atom are close to the kT/h, where T is room temperature. We therefore expect to be able to measure effects associated with QED at finite temperature; in other words, to study how the blackbody radiation affects our experiments. By conducting experiments with real surfaces, we hope to elucidate and perhaps simplify the theoretical models used to describe these systems.
The force experienced by an atom inside a parallel‐plate waveguide is one of the basic phenomena of cavity QED. The full QED expression for this force is a complicated function, which depends upon the atomic oscillator strengths, the position of the atom, and the width of the cavity. For ground‐state atoms one can distinguish two simple limits. (i) When the gap is sufficiently small, the force takes on the form of a van der Waals interaction between the instantaneous electric dipole of the atom and its multiple images in the walls of the waveguide. (ii) In a large gap, when the atom is far from the walls, the van der Waals force is suppressed and the main force predicted by theory is due to the Casimir interaction of the atom with the cavity vacuum field. Whereas the van der Waals force between atoms and conductors has previously been studied experimentally, the Casimir force has not. Here we report the first observation of atom deflection by the Casimir force.
The development of nanotechnology and atom optics relies on understanding how atoms behave and interact with their environment. Isolated atoms can exhibit wavelike (coherent) behavior with a corresponding de Broglie wavelength and phase which can be affected by nearby surfaces. Here an atom interferometer is used to measure the phase shift of Na atom waves induced by the walls of a 50 nm wide cavity. To our knowledge this is the first direct measurement of the de Broglie wave phase shift caused by atom-surface interactions. The magnitude of the phase shift is in agreement with that predicted by Lifshitz theory for a nonretarded van der Waals interaction. This experiment also demonstrates that atom waves can retain their coherence even when atom-surface distances are as small as 10 nm.