Atomic mirror

José Tito Mendonça, Hugo Terças

Benjamin Lev, Y. Lassailly, Chungsok Lee +2 more

We describe the fabrication of an atom mirror by etching of a common hard drive, and we report the observation of specular retroreflection of 11 μK cesium atoms using this mirror. The atoms were trapped and cooled above the hard drive using the mirror magneto-optical trap technique, and upon release, two full bounces were detected. The hard drive atom mirror will be a useful tool for both atom optics and quantum computation.

Arie van Houselt, Raoul van Gastel, Bene Poelsema B +1 more

Yuhong 玉洪 Ye 叶, Hongwei Yu, Jiawei Hu

Abstract We study, in the framework of open quantum systems, the entanglement generation of two atoms in between two parallel mirrors in a thermal bath of quantum scalar fields. We find that the presence of mirrors plays an important role in entanglement generation and protection. The entanglement dynamics is crucially dependent on the geometric configurations of the two-atom system with respect to the mirrors, and the ranges of temperature and interatomic separation within which entanglement can be generated are significantly changed compared with those in a free space. In particular, when the atomic transition wavelength is larger than twice the distance between the two mirrors, the atoms behave as if they were isolated from the environment and the entanglement can persist in the steady state if the atoms are initially entangled and no entanglement can be created if they are initially separable, no matter how the atoms are placed with respect to the mirrors and to each other. This is in sharp contrast to the fact that in a free space, steady-state entanglement is possible only when the two atoms are placed extremely close to each other, while in the presence of one mirror, it is possible when the two atoms placed extremely close to the mirror.

Daniel M. Greenberger, Klaus Hentschel, Friedel Weinert

Arpan Roy, Andrew Bah Shen Jing, Murray D Barrett

We fabricate a miniature spherical mirror for tightly focusing an optical dipole trap for neutral atoms. The mirror formation process is modelled to predict the dimensions for particular fabrication parameters. We integrate the spherical mirror with a neutral atom experiment to trap and detect a single atom with high efficiency. The mirror serves the dual purpose of focusing the dipole trap as well as collecting the atomic fluorescence into an optical fibre.