No Arabic abstract
We consider the phase stability of a local oscillator (or laser) locked to a cavity QED system comprised of atoms with an ultra-narrow optical transition. The atoms are cooled to millikelvin temperatures and then released into the optical cavity. Although the atomic motion introduces Doppler broadening, the standing wave nature of the cavity causes saturated absorption features to appear, which are much narrower than the Doppler width. These features can be used to achieve an extremely high degree of phase stabilization, competitive with the current state-of-the-art. Furthermore, the inhomogeneity introduced by finite atomic velocities can cause optical bistability to disappear, resulting in no regions of dynamic instability and thus enabling a new regime accessible to experiments where optimum stabilization may be achieved.
We explore the potential of direct spectroscopy of ultra-narrow optical transitions of atoms localized in an optical cavity. In contrast to stabilization against a reference cavity, which is the approach currently used for the most highly stabilized lasers, stabilization against an atomic transition does not suffer from Brownian thermal noise. Spectroscopy of ultra-narrow optical transitions in a cavity operates in a very highly saturated regime in which non-linear effects such as bistability play an important role. From the universal behavior of the Jaynes-Cummings model with dissipation, we derive the fundamental limits for laser stabilization using direct spectroscopy of ultra-narrow atomic lines. We find that with current lattice clock experiments, laser linewidths of about 1 mHz can be achieved in principle, and the ultimate limitations of this technique are at the 1 $mu$ Hz level.
We present a new possibility for the active frequency stabilization of a laser using transitions in neutral praseodymium. Because of its five outer electrons, this element shows a high density of energy levels leading to an extremely line-rich excitation spectrum with more than 25000 known spectral lines ranging from the UV to the infrared. We demonstrate the active frequency stabilization of a diode laser on several praseodymium lines between 1105 and 1123 nm. The excitation signals were recorded in a hollow cathode lamp and observed via laser-induced fluorescence. These signals are strong enough to lock the diode laser onto most of the lines by using standard laser locking techniques. In this way, the frequency drifts of the unlocked laser of more than 30 MHz/h were eliminated and the laser frequency stabilized to within 1.4(1) MHz for averaging times >0.2 s. Frequency quadrupling the stabilized diode laser can produce frequency-stable UV-light in the range from 276 to 281 nm. In particular, using a strong hyperfine component of the praseodymium excitation line E = 16 502.616_7/2 cm^-1 -> E = 25 442.742_9/2 cm^-1 at lambda = 1118.5397(4) nm makes it possible - after frequency quadruplication - to produce laser radiation at lambda/4 = 279.6349(1) nm, which can be used to excite the D2 line in Mg^+.
We present theoretical results of a low-loss all-optical switch based on electromagnetically induced transparency and the classical Zeno effect in a microdisk resonator. We show that a control beam can modify the atomic absorption of the evanescent field which suppresses the cavity field buildup and alters the path of a weak signal beam. We predict more than 35 dB of switching contrast with less than 0.1 dB loss using just 2 micro-Watts of control-beam power for signal beams with less than single photon intensities inside the cavity.
We investigate phase shifts in the strong coupling regime of single-atom cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). On the light transmitted through the system, we observe a phase shift associated with an antiresonance and show that both its frequency and width depend solely on the atom, despite the strong coupling to the cavity. This shift is optically controllable and reaches 140 degrees - the largest ever reported for a single emitter. Our result offers a new technique for the characterization of complex integrated quantum circuits.
We propose a new method for frequency conversion of photons which is both versatile and deterministic. We show that a system with two resonators ultrastrongly coupled to a single qubit can be used to realize both single- and multiphoton frequency-conversion processes. The conversion can be exquisitely controlled by tuning the qubit frequency to bring the desired frequency-conversion transitions on or off resonance. Considering recent experimental advances in ultrastrong coupling for circuit QED and other systems, we believe that our scheme can be implemented using available technology.