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Chinese Physics Letters

Continuous Imaging of a Single Neutral Atom in a Variant Magneto-Optical Trap

Tian Xia, Shuyu Zhou, Peng Chen, Li Lin, Tao Hong, Yuzhu Wang

Published Feb 1, 2010• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate continuous imaging of a single 87 Rb atom confined in a steep magneto-optical trap with an electron-multiplying charge-coupled device (EMCCD) camera and realize a one-dimensional micro-optical trap array with a Dammann grating. We adopt several methods to reduce the noise in the fluorescence signal we obtain with the EMCCD. Step jumping characteristics of the fluorescence demonstrate capturing and losing of individual atoms.

DOI
10.1088/0256-307x/27/2/023701

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Continuous Imaging of a Single Neutral Atom in a Variant Magneto-Optical Trap／hyperlinks

Tian Dong Xia, Shuyu Zhou, Peng Chen +3 more

Chinese Physics Letters•Jan 1, 2010•0 citations
We demonstrate continuous imaging of a single 87 Rb atom confined in a steep magneto-optical trap with an electron-multiplying charge-coupled device (EMCCD) camera and realize a one-dimensional micro-optical trap array with a Dammann grating. We adopt several methods to reduce the noise in the fluorescence signal we obtain with the EMCCD. Step jumping characteristics of the fluorescence demonstrate capturing and losing of individual atoms.
We report fluorescence detection of a single 7 Li atom in a magneto-optical trap (MOT). We use a double MOT system, which allows us to control the loading rate of the second MOT by simply turning on or off the first MOT and to use a modest magnetic field gradient of 46 G/cm. A single atom is trapped for longer than 100 s. The fluorescence from the trapped atoms is imaged onto an electron-multiplying charge-coupled device with a unit magnification factor by a pair of aspheric lenses. The numerical aperture of the objective lens is 0.22 with a collecting efficiency of 1.3%. Accumulated fluorescence is extracted by integrating the signal over a region of interest of 500×350 μ m 2 . For a 200-ms exposure time, the fluorescence count from a single atom is 8.8×10 3 and the background count from scattered MOT beams is 6.8 × 10 4 . We actively stabilize the trap beam power to reduce the noise and the measured noise is two times the statistical noise. Overall signal-to-noise ratio of the single-atom detection is 37/√ Hz. We also describe a modification of the system that is adapted to an experimental configuration for quantum manipulation of single atoms in a 1D optical lattice.
Abstract Single alkali-metal atoms in arrays of optical dipole traps represent a quantum register that can be used for quantum computation and simulation based on short-term Rydberg excitations, which switch the interactions between qubits. To load single atoms into optical dipole traps and then detect them by resonance fluorescence, lenses with a large numerical aperture (NA > 0.5) inside a vacuum chamber and expensive EMCCD cameras are commonly used. We present our recent experimental results on demonstrating the trapping of single 87Rb atoms using a long-focus objective lens with a low numerical aperture (NA = 0.172) placed outside the vacuum chamber, and detecting single atoms with a low-cost sCMOS camera. We also present our current results on implementing a single-qubit gate based on optical pumping and subsequent microwave transition between two hyperfine sublevels of a single 87Rb atom with fidelity near 95%.