No Arabic abstract
Besides being a source of energy, light can also cool gases of atoms down to the lowest temperatures ever measured, where atomic motion almost stops. The research field of cold atoms has emerged as a multidisciplinary one, highly relevant, e.g., for precision measurements, quantum gases, simulations of many-body physics, and atom optics. In this focus article, we present the field as seen in 2015, and emphasise the fundamental role in its development that has been played by mastering.
Enhanced sensitivity in electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) can be obtained by the use of noise correlation spectroscopy between the fields involved in the process. Here, we investigate EIT in a cold ($< 1$ mK) rubidium vapor and demonstrate sensitivity to detect weak light-induced forces on the atoms. A theoretical model is developed and shows good agreement with our measurements, enabling the attribution of the observed effects to the coupling of the atomic states to their motion. The effects remain unnoticed on the measurement of the mean fields but are clearly manifest in their correlations.
The coherence of quantum systems is crucial to quantum information processing. While it has been demonstrated that superconducting qubits can process quantum information at microelectronics rates, it remains a challenge to preserve the coherence and therefore the quantum character of the information in these systems. An alternative is to share the tasks between different quantum platforms, e.g. cold atoms storing the quantum information processed by superconducting circuits. In our experiment, we characterize the coherence of superposition states of 87Rb atoms magnetically trapped on a superconducting atom-chip. We load atoms into a persistent-current trap engineered in the vicinity of an off-resonance coplanar resonator, and observe that the coherence of hyperfine ground states is preserved for several seconds. We show that large ensembles of a million of thermal atoms below 350 nK temperature and pure Bose-Einstein condensates with 3.5 x 10^5 atoms can be prepared and manipulated at the superconducting interface. This opens the path towards the rich dynamics of strong collective coupling regimes.
Light propagating in an optically thick sample experiences multiple scattering. It is now known that interferences alter this propagation, leading to an enhanced backscattering, a manifestation of weak localization of light in such diffuse samples. This phenomenon has been extensively studied with classical scatterers. In this letter we report the first experimental evidence for coherent backscattering of light in a laser-cooled gas of Rubidium atoms.
We analyze the temporal response of the fluorescence light that is emitted from a dense gas of cold atoms driven by a laser. When the average interatomic distance is smaller than the wavelength of the photons scattered by the atoms, the system exhibits strong dipolar interactions and collective dissipation. We solve the exact dynamics of small systems with different geometries and show how these collective features are manifest in the scattered light properties such as the photon emission rate, the power spectrum and the second-order correlation function. By calculating these quantities beyond the weak driving limit, we make progress in understanding the signatures of collective behavior in these many-body systems. Furthermore, we clarify the role of disorder on the resonance fluorescence, of direct relevance for recent experimental efforts that aim at the exploration of many-body effects in dipole-dipole interacting gases of atoms.
We report investigation of near-resonance light scattering from a cold and dense atomic gas of $^{87}$Rb atoms. Measurements are made for probe frequencies tuned near the $F=2to F=3$ nearly closed hyperfine transition, with particular attention paid to the dependence of the scattered light intensity on detuning from resonance, the number of atoms in the sample, and atomic sample size. We find that, over a wide range of experimental variables, the optical depth of the atomic sample serves as an effective single scaling parameter which describes well all the experimental data.