No Arabic abstract
Two-atom systems in small traps are of fundamental interest, first of all for understanding the role of interactions in degenerate cold gases and for the creation of quantum gates in quantum information processing with single-atom traps. One of the key quantities is the inelastic relaxation (decay) time when one of the atoms or both are in a higher hyperfine state. Here we measure this quantity in a heteronuclear system of $^{87}$Rb and $^{85}$Rb in a micro optical trap and demonstrate experimentally and theoretically the presence of both fast and slow relaxation processes, depending on the choice of the initial hyperfine states. The developed experimental method allows us to single out a particular relaxation process and, in this sense, our experiment is a superclean platform for collisional physics studies. Our results have also implications for engineering of quantum states via controlled collisions and creation of two-qubit quantum gates.
We report the realization of a heteronuclear two-atom of $^{87}$Rb-$^{85}$Rb in the ground state of an optical tweezer (OT). Starting by trapping two different isotopic single atoms, a $^{87}$Rb and a $^{85}$Rb in two strongly focused and linearly polarized OT with 4 $mu$m apart, we perform simultaneously three dimensional Raman sideband cooling for both atoms and the obtained 3D ground state probabilities of $^{87}$Rb and $^{85}$Rb are 0.91(5) and 0.91(10) respectively. There is no obvious crosstalk observed during the cooling process. We then merge them into one tweezer via a species-dependent transport, where the species-dependent potentials are made by changing the polarization of the OTs for each species from linear polarization to the desired circular polarization. The measurable increment of vibrational quantum due to merging is $0.013(1)$ for the axial dimension. This two-atom system can be used to investigate cold collisional physics, to form quantum logic gates, and to build a single heteronuclear molecule. It can also be scaled up to few-atom regime and extended to other atomic species and molecules, and thus to ultracold chemistry.
We study cold heteronuclear atom ion collisions by immersing a trapped single ion into an ultracold atomic cloud. Using ultracold atoms as reaction targets, our measurement is sensitive to elastic collisions with extremely small energy transfer. The observed energy-dependent elastic atom-ion scattering rate deviates significantly from the prediction of Langevin but is in full agreement with the quantum mechanical cross section. Additionally, we characterize inelastic collisions leading to chemical reactions at the single particle level and measure the energy-dependent reaction rate constants. The reaction products are identified by in-trap mass spectrometry, revealing the branching ratio between radiative and non-radiative charge exchange processes.
We propose a method to exploit high finesse optical resonators for light assisted coherent manipulation of atomic ensembles, overcoming the limit imposed by the finite response time of the cavity. The key element of our scheme is to rapidly switch the interaction between the atoms and the cavity field with an auxiliary control process as, for example, the light shift induced by an optical beam. The scheme is applicable to many different atomic species, both in trapped and free fall configurations, and can be adopted to control the internal and/or external atomic degrees of freedom. Our method will open new possibilities in cavity-aided atom interferometry and in the preparation of highly non-classical atomic states.
In light-pulsed atom interferometry, the phase accumulated by atoms depends on the effective wave vector of the absorbed photons. In this work, we proposed a theory model to analyses the effective wave vector of photons in structured light. As for monochromatic optical field, a transverse confinement could lead to diffraction. We put forward that in light-atom interaction, the atom wave function could also provide a transverse confinement thus affect the effective wave vector of the absorbed photons. We calculated the relative shift of the photon effective wave vector when an atom with a Gaussian wave function absorbs one photon at the waist in a Gaussian beam. This shift could lead to a systematic effect related to atom spatial distribution in high precision experiment based on light-pulsed atom interferometry.
We present an experimental study of cavity assisted Rydberg atom electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) using a high-finesse optical cavity ($F sim 28000$). Rydberg atoms are excited via a two-photon transition in a ladder-type EIT configuration. A three-peak structure of the cavity transmission spectrum is observed when Rydberg EIT is generated inside the cavity. The two symmetrically spaced side peaks are caused by bright-state polaritons, while the central peak corresponds to a dark-state polariton. Anti-crossing phenomenon and the effects of mirror adsorbate electric fields are studied under different experimental conditions. We determine a lower bound on the coherence time for the system of $7.26 pm 0.06 ,mu$s, most likely limited by laser dephasing. The cavity-Rydberg EIT system can be useful for single photon generation using the Rydberg blockade effect, studying many-body physics, and generating novel quantum states amongst many other applications.