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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

Feedback cooling of a single neutral atom

M. Koch, Christian Sames, Alexander Kubanek, Matthias Apel, Maximilian Balbach, Alexei Ourjoumtsev, Haytham Chibani, Tatjana Wilk, Pepijn W. H. Pinkse, Karim Murr, Gerhard Rempe

Published May 1, 2011• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Maxwell realized in a famous thought experiment, which is nowadays known as Maxwell's demon, that the thermodynamic parameters of a system can be altered by performing feedback on the system's individual constituents. Here we report on the implementation of a related scheme to cool the motion of a single neutral atom.
DOI
10.1109/cleoe.2011.5943297

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The long-standing paradigm of Maxwell’s demon is till nowadays a frequently investigated issue, which still provides interesting insights into basic physical questions. Considering a single-electron transistor, where we implement a Maxwell demon by a piecewise-constant feedback protocol, we investigate quantum implications of the Maxwell demon. To this end, we harness a dynamical coarse-graining method, which provides a convenient and accurate description of the system dynamics even for high measurement rates. In doing so, we are able to investigate the Maxwell demon in a quantum-Zeno regime leading to transport blockade. We argue that there is a measurement rate providing an optimal performance. Moreover, we find that besides building up a chemical gradient, there can be also a regime where the feedback loop additionally extracts energy, which results from the energy non-conserving character of the projective measurement.
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We demonstrate a general and efficient informational cooling technique for atoms that is an experimental realization of a one-dimensional Maxwell's demon. The technique transfers atoms from a magnetic trap into an optical trap via a single spontaneous Raman transition that is discriminatively driven near each atom's classical turning point. In this way, nearly all of the atomic ensemble's kinetic energy in one dimension is removed. We develop a simple analytical model to predict the efficiency of transfer between the traps and provide evidence that the performance is limited only by particle dynamics in the magnetic trap. Transfer efficiencies up to 2.2% are reported. We show that efficiency can be traded for phase-space compression, and we report compression up to a factor of 350. Our results represent a 15-fold improvement over our previous demonstration of the cooling technique.