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Acta Physica Sinica

Optical dipole trap in a high-finesse micro-cavity

Tao Liu, Tiancai Zhang, Junmin Wang, Peng Kun-Chi, 量子光学与光量子器件国家重点实验室，山西大学光电研究所，太原 030006

Published Jan 1, 2004• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Optical dipole potential in an inhomogeneous light field is an important method of realizing the laser cooling and trapping of single atoms. The optical dipole trap in the highfinesse microcavity is discussed, and different confi gur ations of optical potential composed of standing wave and vertical confined beam s are analyzed. It is shown that the submicron scale optical trap could be ob t ained in this microcavity with the potential depth of about mK. The strong cou pling of atom and the cavity mode can be realized. We also discuss the effect of laser line width on the depth of potential well.

DOI
10.7498/aps.53.1346

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Optical dipole potential in an inhomogeneous light field is an important method of realizing the laser cooling and trapping of single atoms. The optical dipole trap in the highfinesse microcavity is discussed, and different confi gur ations of optical potential composed of standing wave and vertical confined beam s are analyzed. It is shown that the submicron scale optical trap could be ob t ained in this microcavity with the potential depth of about mK. The strong cou pling of atom and the cavity mode can be realized. We also discuss the effect of laser line width on the depth of potential well.
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We discuss our recent experimental demonstrations of three novel atom traps which are all based on the optical dipole force in far-detuned laser light. In the gravito-optical surface trap (GOST), Cs atoms are trapped and cooled by means of an evanescent-wave mirror very closely above a dielectric surface. This trap allows for optical cooling at very high densities and provides good starting conditions for evaporative cooling to quantum degeneracy and the realization of a 2D quantum gas. The conical atom trap (CAT) uses a hollow blue-detuned laser beam in combination with gravity to trap atoms in a dark spatial region. This trap is experimentally simple and provides high loading efficiency, tight confinement, efficient sub-Doppler cooling, and strong suppression of collisional losses. The standing-wave red-detuned (STAR) trap allows one to confine atoms in a shallow optical potential at a very low photon scattering rate, and is thus an interesting tool for studies of the atomic ground-state dynamics in external electro-magnetic fields. We have studied atomic spin polarization in this trap.
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.
Summary form only given. The strong atom-photon coupling generated inside high-finesse optical micro cavity lets us detect a single atom trajectory in real time. Such a strong coupling is a candidate for trapping a single atom with a single photon. Dynamics of trapped atoms can be observed in situ and in real time by detecting intensity change on the transmission of a blue-shifted laser beam. We cooled down and trapped rubidium atoms by using conventional cell magneto optical trap (MOT) and launched them into the micro optical cavity which locates 35 mm above the MOT. By using this signal as trigger and changing the laser frequency, it is, in principle, possible to trap the atom in the cavity.
In this thesis a single atom is trapped in the mode of a high-finesse cavity and used to generate single photons in a controlled way. Starting from a magneto-optical trap, rubidium atoms are loaded into an optical dipole-force trap and transported to the cavity. On arrival the atoms are trapped in another trap with a standing wave geometry and excited by a pump laser incident perpendicular to the cavity axis. With the help of cavity cooling forces, a single atom could then be selected and trapped for up to a minute. A sequence of laser pulses is applied to induce the emission of a stream of single photons from the atom. Up to 300000 photons could be generated from the same atom in this way. The single-photon character of the source is verified within a few seconds after which the photons can be distributed to an independent user while monitoring the presence of the atom.
By integrating the techniques of laser cooling and trapping with those of cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED), single cesium atoms have been trapped within the mode of a small, high finesse optical cavity in a regime of strong coupling. The observed lifetime for individual atoms trapped within the cavity mode is $\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremath{\approx}28\mathrm{ms}$, and is limited by fluctuations of light forces arising from the far-detuned intracavity field. This initial realization of trapped atoms in cavity QED should enable diverse protocols in quantum information science.