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Q: Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 38: Poster Fallen und Kühlung

Q 38.6: Poster

Thursday, March 25, 2004, 14:00–16:00, Schellingstr. 3

Localising a single atom in a cavity-QED field — •N. Syassen, P. Maunz, I. Schuster, T. Puppe, P.W.H. Pinkse, and G. Rempe — Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, 85748 Garching, Germany

A single atom trapped in the field mode of a small high-finesse cavity forms the paradigm of cavity-QED. Questions in fundamental quantum optics, like investigations on quantum measurement can be addressed in such a system. Moreover, fascinating applications in quantum-information processing and quantum computing are being developed. For many of these applications, trapping of an atom in the cavity mode alone is not enough. Ideally, the atom should not move and be perfectly localized at the antinode of the cavity-QED field.

Here we analyse the localisation of a single atom stored in an intracavity dipole trap. Cavity cooling [1,2] as presented in talk Q6.1 is used to improve the localisation and to compensate for heating introduced by probing the atom-cavity system. Resolving the normal modes of the coupled system is only possible for a large and constant enough coupling. Once the normal modes are resolved, the broadening of the normal-mode resonances allows us to investigate the variation in coupling strength and hence how well the atom is localized.

[1] P. Horak et al. H. Ritsch, Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 4974 (1997). V. Vuletić and S. Chu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 3787 (2000).

[2] P. Maunz, T. Puppe, I. Schuster, N. Syassen, P.W.H Pinkse, and G. Rempe, to be published.