Trapping and observing single atoms in the dark [Elektronische Ressource] / Thomas A. Puppe

Thomas A. Puppe

Sujets

• Physik

Informations

• Publié par: technische_universitat_munchen
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 17
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

Technische Universit at Munc hen
Max-Planck-Institut fur Quantenoptik
Trapping and observing single
atoms in the dark
Thomas A. Puppe
Vollst andiger Abdruck der von der Fakult at fur Physik
der Technischen Universit at Munc hen
zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines
Doktors der Naturwissenschaften (Dr. rer. nat.)
genehmigten Dissertation.
Vorsitzender : Univ.-Prof. Dr. H. Friedrich
Prufer der Dissertation :
1. Hon.-Prof. Dr. G. Rempe
2. Univ.-Prof. Dr. F. von Feilitzsch
Die Dissertation wurde am 23. 05. 2007
bei der Technischen Universit at Munc hen eingereicht
und durch die Fakult at fur Physik am 23. 07. 2007 angenommen.Abstract
A single atom strongly coupled to a single mode of a high- nesse cavity is the principal
system of matter-light interaction. Experimental studies of fundamental e ects in this require a reliable localization of the atom in the cavity mode.
This thesis reports the realization of a novel blue-detuned intracavity dipole trap.
The blue trap combines the perfectly aligned, high-contrast modes of the high- nesse
cavity to form a potential landscape in which an atom is stored close to a dark cen-
ter, where the Stark shift vanishes. As a consequence, the free-space properties of the
con ned atom are largely retained, while it is well isolated by the surrounding repellant
blue light. The exibility to individually tailor the radial and axial con nement enables
e cient loading. Cavity cooling is used to reliably prepare strong coupling.
The performance of the blue trap is demonstrated by spectroscopy of the normal
modes of the coupled system. Good localization in a region of strong coupling and a Stark
shift below the atomic linewidth are deduced from the spectrum by comparison with the
analytical theory. Moreover, the preserved large atom-cavity detunings implement the
dispersive regime, where the presence of the atom is detected while it spontaneously
scatters only about one photon. Hence, single atoms are trapped and observed in the
dark. Since strong cavity-induced heating can be avoided, the blue trap stores atoms in a
parameter regime compatible with three-dimensional cavity cooling, which can increase
storage times by orders of magnitude.
A rst application of the intracavity dipole trap is the spectroscopy of the Jaynes-
Cummings ladder. The vacuum-Rabi splitting for a single trapped atom is a direct proof
for strong coupling and can be fully explained by semiclassical theory. In contrast, the
splitting of the higher doublets is a distinct signature of eld quantization. A rst ob-
servation of two-photon excitation to the second doublet using bichromatic spectroscopy
was enabled by the blue trap. This illustrates the potential of the blue intracavity dipole
trap for the study of fundamental quantum e ects.
An impressive feature of the strong coupling regime is the ability to infer the spatial
position of a single atom from the cavity transmission. Single atom transits are observed
with an experimental adaption of the atomic kaleidoscope that uses a combination of
higher-order modes to obtain position information in the transverse plane.Contents
Title 1
1 Introduction 9
1.1 The strongly-coupled atom-cavity system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2 The present work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2 Theory of the atom-cavity-trap system 15
2.1 Jaynes-Cummings model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.2 Open quantum system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.2.1 Quantum regression theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.3 Atomic motion and light force . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.3.1 Force operator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.4 Low-excitation limit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.5 Momentum di usion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.6 Velocity-dependent forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.7 Intracavity dipole trap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3 The idea of the blue intracavity dipole trap 31
3.1 Intracavity dipole traps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.2 The red trap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.3 The blue trap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4 Cooling and detection 37
4.1 Cavity cooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4.1.1 Cooling region I (jj< ; > 0) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39c a
4.1.2 Cooling II ( < < 0) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39a c
4.2 Resonant and o -resonant detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.3 Cooling regions and Stark shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
5 Numerical simulation 43
5.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
5.2 Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
5.3 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
5.3.1 Cooling region I (jj< ; > 0) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46c a
56 Contents
5.3.2 Cooling region II ( < < 0) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50a c
5.3.3 Sample trajectory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
6 Experimental setup 57
6.1 Magneto-optical trap and atomic fountain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
6.2 Fluorescence laser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
6.3 Optical pumping beam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
6.4 High- nesse cavity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
6.5 Laser system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
6.5.1 Dipole laser stabilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
6.5.2 On-axis cavity excitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
6.5.3 Probe beam (780:24 nm) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
6.5.4 Red trap and stabilization laser (785:2 nm) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
6.5.5 Axial con nement laser: pancakes (772:5 nm) . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
6.5.6 Transverse guiding & trapping: funnels & doughnut (775:2 nm) . . 66
6.6 Science cavity stabilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
6.7 Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
6.8 Data acquisition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
7 Experimental realization of the blue trap 71
7.1 Blue-detuned modes for guiding and trapping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
7.2 Sample trace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
7.3 trace for blue only trap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
7.4 Normal-mode splitting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
7.5 Single atom detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
7.5.1 Resonant dispersive detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
7.5.2 Poisson analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
7.6 Quali cation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
7.7 Velocity-dependent forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
7.8 Cavity cooling in the blue trap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
7.9 Towards three-dimensional cavity cooling in the blue trap . . . . . . . . . 88
7.10 Conclusions and prospects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
8 Spectroscopy of the atom-cavity system 91
8.1 Analytical concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
8.2 Normal-mode splitting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
8.3 Theoretical analysis of the two-photon spectroscopy . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
8.3.1 Model systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
8.3.2 Spectroscopy of the atom-cavity system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
8.4 Numerical simulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
8.4.1 Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
8.4.2 Bichromatic spectroscopy of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder . . . . . 101
8.5 Experimental two-photon spectra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
8.5.1 Two-photon spectrum in the red trap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103Contents 7
8.5.2 Two-photon spectrum in the blue trap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
9 Kaleidoscope 107
9.1 Higher order modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
9.2 Idea of the kaleidoscope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
9.3 Experimental cavity modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
9.4 Transits through TEM + TEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11110 01
9.4.1 Transits through TEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11310
9.4.2 T TEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11301
9.4.3 Simultaneous transits through TEM & TEM . . . . . . . . . . 11301 10
9.5 Atom in blue-detuned laser elds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115<