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New Journal of Physics

Schemes for nondestructive quantum gas microscopy of single atoms in an optical lattice

Daichi Okuno, Yoshiki Amano, Katsunari Enomoto, Nobuyuki Takei, Yoshiro Takahashi

Published Jan 1, 2020• 18 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract We propose a quantum gas microscope for ultracold atoms that enables nondestructive atom detection, thus evading higher-band excitation and change of the internal degrees of freedom. We show that photon absorption of a probe beam cannot be ignored even in dispersive detection to obtain a signal-to-noise ratio greater than unity because of the shot noise of the probe beam under a standard measurement condition. The first scheme we consider for the nondestructive detection, applicable to an atom that has an electronic ground state without spin degrees of freedom, is to utilize a magic-wavelength condition of the optical lattice for the transition for probing. The second is based on the dispersive Faraday effect and squeezed quantum noise and is applicable to an atom with spins in the ground state. In this second scheme, a scanning microscope is adopted to exploit the squeezed state and reduce the effective losses. Application to ultracold ytterbium atoms is discussed.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/ab6af9

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Abstract We propose a quantum gas microscope for ultracold atoms that enables nondestructive atom detection, thus evading higher-band excitation and change of the internal degrees of freedom. We show that photon absorption of a probe beam cannot be ignored even in dispersive detection to obtain a signal-to-noise ratio greater than unity because of the shot noise of the probe beam under a standard measurement condition. The first scheme we consider for the nondestructive detection, applicable to an atom that has an electronic ground state without spin degrees of freedom, is to utilize a magic-wavelength condition of the optical lattice for the transition for probing. The second is based on the dispersive Faraday effect and squeezed quantum noise and is applicable to an atom with spins in the ground state. In this second scheme, a scanning microscope is adopted to exploit the squeezed state and reduce the effective losses. Application to ultracold ytterbium atoms is discussed.
We describe a scheme for probing a gas of ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice and moving in the presence of an external potential. The probe is nondestructive and uses the existing lattice fields as the measurement device. Two counterpropagating cavity fields simultaneously set up a conservative lattice potential and a weak quantum probe of the atomic motion. Balanced heterodyne detection of the probe field at the cavity output along with integration in time and across the atomic cloud yield information about the atomic dynamics in a single run. The scheme is applied to a measurement of the Bloch oscillation frequency for atoms moving in the presence of the local gravitational potential. Signal-to-noise ratios are estimated to be as high as 104{10}^{4}104.
We propose a new technique for the detection of single atoms in ultracold quantum gases. The technique is based on scanning electron microscopy and employs the electron impact ionization of trapped atoms with a focused electron probe. Subsequent detection of the resulting ions allows for the reconstruction of the atom's position. This technique is expected to achieve a much better spatial resolution compared to any optical detection method. In combination with the sensitivity to single atoms, it makes new in situ measurements of atomic correlations possible. The detection principle is also well suited for the addressing of individual sites in optical lattices.
Abstract The site-resolved detection of ultracold atoms in optical lattice potentials is a powerful technique to study lattice models of correlated quantum matter. In their recent paper, Yamamoto et al (2016 New J. Phys. 18 023016 ) demonstrate a quantum gas microscope for ultracold ytterbium atoms. By simultaneously cooling these atoms on two optical transitions, they show that fluorescent images of the lattice gas can be obtained while keeping the atoms pinned to their lattice sites even for a lattice spacing as small as 266 nm. This promises to be a powerful enabling tool for studies of metrology and quantum magnetism with quantum degenerate gases of ytterbium.
The paper reports on the optical detection and spectroscopy of ultracold atoms near a gold surface.A probe light field is used to excite surface plasmon polaritons.The refractive index of the atomic gas shifts the plasmon resonance and changes the reflected light power.Thus, the sensitivity of the detection is plasmonically enhanced.Absorption of photons from the evanescent wave is avoided by detuning the laser from atomic resonance which makes the detection scheme potentially nondestructive.The spectrum of the signal is determined by a Fano resonance.We show that atoms can be detected nondestructively with single atom resolution for typical parameters in cold atom experiments.Thus, the method is suitable for quantum nondemolition measurements of matter wave amplitudes.Experimentally, we measure a technically limited sensitivity of 30 atoms and extend the detection scheme to dispersively image the atom cloud near the surface.
We propose a versatile experimental probe for cold atomic gases analogous to the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in condensed matter. This probe uses the coherent coupling of a single particle to the system. Depending on the measurement sequence, our probe allows us to obtain either the local density and spatial density correlations, with a resolution on the nanometer scale, or the single particle correlation function in real time. We discuss applications of this scheme to the various possible phases for a two dimensional Hubbard system of fermions in an optical lattice.
This thesis reports on new experimental techniques for the study of strongly correlated states of ultracold atoms in optical lattices. We used a high numerical aperture imaging system to probe 87Rb atoms in a two-dimensional lattice with single-site resolution. Fluorescence imaging allows to detect single atoms with a large signal to noise ratio and to reconstruct the atom distribution on the lattice. We applied this new technique to a two-dimensional Mott insulator and directly observed number squeezing and the emerging shell structure. A comparison of the radial density and variance distributions to theory provides a precise in situ temperature and entropy measurement from single images. We find entropies around the critical value for quantum magnetism. In a second series of experiments, we demonstrated two-dimensional single-site spin control in the optical lattice. The differential light shift of a tightly focused laser beam shifts selected atoms into resonance with a microwave field driving a spin flip. In this way, we reach sub-diffraction limited spatial resolution well below the lattice spacing. Starting from a Mott insulator with unity filling we were able to create arbitrary spin patterns. We used this ability to prepare atom distributions to study one-dimensional single-particle tunneling dynamics in a lattice. By discriminating the dynamics of the ground state and of the first excited band, we find that our addressing scheme leaves most atoms in the vibrational ground state. Moreover, we studied coherent light scattering from the atoms in the optical lattice and found diffraction maxima in the far-field. We showed that an antiferromagnetic order leads to additional diffraction peaks which can be used to detect this order also when single-site resolution is not available. The new techniques described in this thesis open the path to a wide range of novel applications from quantum dynamics of spin impurities, entropy transport, implementation of novel cooling schemes, and engineering of quantum many-body phases to quantum information processing.