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IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics

Laser experiments with single atoms as a test of basic physics

F. Diedrich, Jonas Krause, Gerhard Rempe, Marlan O. Scully, HERBERT WALTHER

Published Jul 1, 1988• 79 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Two experiments with single atoms are reviewed. In the first experiment, the interaction of a single Rydberg atom with a single mode of an electromagnetic field was investigated. The quantum collapse and revivals of the atomic inversion predicted by the Jaynes-Cummings model were demonstrated for the first time. In the second experiment, a single atomic ion stored in a radio-frequency trap was probed by resonance fluorescence. In the fluorescent light, antibunching and sub-Poissonian photon statistics were detected. Furthermore, 'crystallization' and 'evaporation' of few ions in a trap were observed as the stored ions were cooled by the laser light and heated by the radio-frequency field of the trap.>

DOI
10.1109/3.968

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Two experiments with single atoms are reviewed. In the first experiment, the interaction of a single Rydberg atom with a single mode of an electromagnetic field was investigated. The quantum collapse and revivals of the atomic inversion predicted by the Jaynes-Cummings model were demonstrated for the first time. In the second experiment, a single atomic ion stored in a radio-frequency trap was probed by resonance fluorescence. In the fluorescent light, antibunching and sub-Poissonian photon statistics were detected. Furthermore, 'crystallization' and 'evaporation' of few ions in a trap were observed as the stored ions were cooled by the laser light and heated by the radio-frequency field of the trap.>
Modern methods of laser spectroscopy allow the study of single atoms or ions in an unperturbed environment. This has opened up interesting new experiments, an among them is the detailed study of radiation-atom coupling. This chapter reviews the following two experiments of this type: the single-atom maser and the study of the resonance fluorescence of a single stored ion. The simplest and most fundamental system for studying radiation-matter coupling is a single two-level atom interacting with a single mode of an electromagnetic field in a cavity. There is another aspect of the single-atom maser which is very interesting: the non-classical statistics of the photons in the cavity. The results obtained for the single-atom maser also give a new insight into the statistical properties of masers and lasers. A problem in radiation-matter interaction which has received a lot of interest is resonance fluorescence. The experiments to investigate antibunching in resonance fluorescence have been performed by means of laser-excited collimated atomic beams.
. In this paper experiments performed with the one-atom maser are reviewed. Furthermore, possible experiments to test basic quantum physics are discussed. Introduction, the One-Atom-Maser The most promising avenue to study the generation process of radiation in lasers and masers is to drive a maser consisting of a single mode cavity by single atoms. This system, at first glance, seems to be another example of a Gedanken-experiment treated in the pioneering work of Jaynes and Cummings (1963), but such a one-atom maser (Meschede, Walther and Müller, 1985) really exists and can in addition be used to study the basic principles of radiation-atom interaction. The advantages of the system are: it is the first maser which sustains oscillations with less than one atom on the average in the cavity, this setup allows to study in detail the conditions necessary to obtain nonclassical radiation, especially radiation with sub-Poissonian photon statistics in a maser system directly in a Poissonian pumping process, and it is possible to study a variety of phenomena of a quantum field including the quantum measurement process. What are the tools that make this device work: It was the enormous progress in constructing superconducting cavities together with the laser preparation of highly excited atoms – Rydberg atoms – that have made the realization of such a one-atom maser possible.
The dynamics of the interaction of a single Rydberg atom with a single mode of an electromagnetic field in a superconducting cavity was investigated. Velocity-selected atoms were used and the evolution of the atomic inversion as atom and field exchange energy was observed. The quantum collapse and revival predicted by the Jaynes-Cummings model were demonstrated experimentally for the first time. The evaluation of the dynamic behavior of the atoms allows us to determine the statistics of the few photons in the cavity.
In the experiment, single Rubidium-87 atoms are loaded out of a molasses of Doppler-cooled atoms into the focus of a Gaussian laser beam created by a single mode laser diode with a wavelength of 856 nm. A confocal microscope outside our vacuum chamber is used to focus the trapping beam to a minimal waist of 3.5 /spl mu/m (thus creating a trap depth of 1-2 mK) and to collect the fluorescence light from the center of the dipole trap. The collected fluorescence light is coupled into a single-mode optical fiber for spatial filtering, and the photons are detected with an avalanche photodiode. With this setup the overall detection efficiency of photons emitted from the trap region is about 0.2%. First experimental results show sub-Poissonian occupation statistics of the dipole trap: only single atoms are observed inside our trap, never two ore more. The measured 1/e lifetime of atoms inside the dipole trap in the presence of cooling light is about 1-2 seconds. To prove that we really observe single atoms inside the trap, a Hanbury-Brown-Twiss measurement of the fluorescence light from the trap will be shown. The trapping of single atoms inside our dipole trap marks the first step towards the investigation of the properties of an entangled atom photon state. Progress in preparing and analyzing single atoms in well defined hyperfine ground states will be reported.