Ultra-High Resolution Atom Imaging in a Light - Gradient

J. David Wong-Campos, K. G. Johnson, Brian Neyenhuis +2 more

J. R. Gardner, M. Marable, George R. Welch +1 more

Recently, we have begun to develop optical techniques for ultra‐high resolution position measurement and localization of moving atoms. The methods employ Raman‐induced resonance imaging in which a spatially varying potential correlates an atomic resonance frequency with the atomic position. Optical methods are ideally suited for high resolution resonance imaging because they permit the study of very small volumes, which facilitates the use of spatially varying potentials with very large gradients and eliminates the need to place mechanical surfaces in the region to be studied. Hence, the methods have many applications to atom optics experiments in both beams and traps, where they can be used to create and measure small scale atomic spatial distributions and to perform spatial correlation experiments. The current experiments demonstrate a new method of imaging employing a spatially varying light‐shift to achieve spatial resolution of 200 nanometers, with a few percent linearity over several microns. Centroids of localized atomic distributions are determined from the χ2 fits with an accuracy of ±20 nanometers. New experiments employing still larger gradients and single atom detection are expected to achieve nanometer spatial resolution, limited by the uncertainty principle.

Mateusz Mazelanik, Adam Leszczyński, Michał Lipka +2 more

Plenty of quantum information protocols are enabled by manipulation and detection of photonic spectro-temporal degrees of freedom via light–matter interfaces. While present implementations are well suited for high-bandwidth photon sources such as quantum dots, they lack the high resolution required for intrinsically narrowband light–atom interactions. Here, we demonstrate far-field temporal imaging based on ac-Stark spatial spin-wave phase manipulation in a multimode gradient echo memory. We achieve a spectral resolution of 20 kHz with MHz-level bandwidth and an ultralow noise equivalent to 0.023 photons, enabling operation in the single-quantum regime.

John Thomas

Xiujie Fang, Kai Wei, Tian Zhao +5 more

Ultra-sensitive multi-channel optically pumped atomic magnetometers based on the spin-exchange relaxation-free (SERF) effect are powerful tools for applications in the field of magnetic imaging. To simultaneously achieve ultra-high spatial resolution and ultra-high magnetic field sensitivity, we proposed a high-resolution multi-channel SERF atomic magnetometer for two-dimensional magnetic field measurements based on a digital micro-mirror device (DMD) as the spatial light modulator for a single vapor cell. Under the optimal experimental conditions obtained via spatial and temporal modulation of the probe light, we first demonstrated that the average sensitivity of the proposed 25-channel magnetometer was approximately 25fT/Hz 1/2 with a spatial resolution of 216µm. Then, we measured the magnetic field distribution generated by a gradient coil and compared the experimentally obtained distributions with those calculated via finite element simulation. The obtained g value of 99.2% indicated good agreement between our experimental results and the theoretical calculations, thereby confirming that our proposed multi-channel SERF magnetometer was effective at measuring magnetic field distributions with an ultra-high spatial resolution.

Wilhelm G. Kaenders, Frank Lison, A. Richter +2 more