Two-dimensional sub-half-wavelength atom localization via phase control of absorption and gain

Abstract

We propose a scheme for two-dimensional atom localization based on the coherent controlled absorption and gain of a weak probe field in a four-level double-\ensuremath{\Lambda} system, in which the atom interacts with two orthogonal standing-wave fields. Owing to the space-dependent atom-field interaction, the position probability distribution of the atom passing through the standing waves can be directly determined by measuring the resulting absorption and gain spectra. The phase-sensitive property of the atomic system significantly reduces the uncertainty in the position measurement of the atom. It is found that, by properly varying the parameters of the system, we can achieve sub-half-wavelength atom localization with high precision. Especially the probability of finding the atom at a particular position can be 100$%$ when a photon with certain frequency is absorbed or amplified. Numerical calculations and qualitative analyses show that the enhancement of precision in the position measurement of the atom is attributed to the interference between the one-photon excitation and the phase-dependent three-photon excitation from the closed interacting contour in the laser-driven atomic system.