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Optics Letters

Emission pattern of an atomic dipole in a high-finesse optical cavity

Peter Maunz, Thomas Puppe, T. Fischer, Pepijn W. H. Pinkse, Gerhard Rempe

Published Jan 1, 2003• 12 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An atom placed in a small high-finesse optical cavity will dominantly emit into modes sustained by the cavity. If the cavity supports many frequency-degenerate modes, the radiation pattern depends strongly on the position of the atom. These patterns can be used to detect the position of the atom with high sensitivity.
DOI
10.1364/ol.28.000046

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Atom-photon interfaces are one of the building blocks of the future quantum information protocols. Accomplishing a strong interaction between the atom and the photons can be successfully done by high finesse and small mode volume cavities. However, this method requires sophisticated dielectric coatings and stabilization of the cavity against even small vibrations and small line width of those cavities impose higher input photon numbers if spontaneously emitted photons are to be used, which make it seem hard to scale up such atom-light interfaces to form quantum networks. An alternative method is to use a nearly concentric cavity, which has a strongly focused optical mode [1].
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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.
Cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED) describes electromagnetic fields in a confined space and the radiative properties of atoms in such fields. The simplest example of such system is a single atom interacting with one mode of a high-finesse resonator. Besides observation and exploration of fundamental quantum mechanical effects, this system bears a high potential for applications quantum information science such as, e.g., quantum logic gates, quantum communication and quantum teleportation. In this thesis I present an experiment on the deterministic coupling of a single neutral atom to the mode of a high-finesse optical resonator. In Chapter 1 I describe our basic techniques for trapping and observing single cesium atoms. As a source of single atoms we use a high-gradient magneto-optical trap, which captures the atoms from background gas in a vacuum chamber and cools them down to millikelvin temperatures. The atoms are then transferred without loss into a standing-wave dipole trap, which provides a conservative potential required for experiments on atomic coherence such as quantum information processing and metrology on trapped atoms. Moreover, shifting the standing-wave pattern allows us to deterministically transport the atoms (Chapter 2). In combination with non-destructive fluorescence imaging of individual trapped atoms, this enables us to control their position with submicrometer precision over several millimeters along the dipole trap. The cavity QED system can distinctly display quantum behaviour in the so-called strong coupling regime, i.e., when the coherent atom-cavity coupling rate dominates dissipation in the system. This sets the main requirements on the resonator's properties: small mode volume and high finesse. Chapter 3 is devoted to the manufacturing, assembling, and testing of an ultra-high finesse optical Fabry-Perot resonator, stabilized to the atomic transition. In Chapter 4 I present the transportation of single atoms into the cavity and their coupling to the cavity mode. The strong coupling manifests itself in a strong reduction of the cavity transmission probed by a weak external laser. The atoms remain trapped and coupled to the cavity mode for several seconds until we move them out of the cavity for final analysis of their number and position.
Summary form only given. Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics (CQED) has been at the forefront of modem atomic physics and quantum optics. Of particular importance of CQED is the strong coupling regime whereby the coupling rate between atoms and cavity field dominates other dissipative rates [1]. To date, the requirements to obtain such significant interaction have been presumed to have micro-cavities with a high finesse and small mode volumes. Though having demonstrated remarkable results and progress, such cavities with limited optical access, high reflectivity coating and close distance between mirrors pose a challenge for scaling up and embedding other systems with CQED such as ion traps.In this work, we take an alternative approach of employing cavity designs with strong focusing modes [2]. Central to our experiment is a cavity in the near concentric point with a finesse of 150. The cavity has a length of 11mm, a radius of curvature of 5.5mm and accommodates a focusing mode of approximately 5um beam waist. We trapped a single Rb87 atom at the centre of the cavity by an intra-cavity dipole trap. We observed the lineshape splitting in the transmission spectrum of cavity under the present of the trapped single atoms. The cooperativity of 0.1 can be deduced from Fig 1 and place our system in the intermediate coupling regime. This first observation of lineshape splitting with centimetre long and low finesse cavity promises the broader use of CQED and new exploration of CQED physics at strong focusing regime, where all optical cavity modes become degenerate.