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Q: Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 38: Fallen & Kühlung I

Q 38.3: Vortrag

Dienstag, 8. März 2005, 11:45–12:00, HU 2002

Controlling the coupling of a single atom to a cavity — •Markus Hijlkema, Stefan Nussmann, Bernhard Weber, Axel Kuhn, and Gerhard Rempe — MPI für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Str. 1, D85748 Garching bei München, Germany

We report on an experiment where single cold rubidium atoms trapped in an optical lattice can be coupled to an optical cavity in a controlled way.

Starting from a magneto-optical trap (MOT) cold atoms are loaded into a far detuned optical dipole trap and guided to a cavity where they are stored in a standing wave dipole trap perpendicular to the cavity axis. The atoms in the optical lattice are excited by laserlight incident from the side. As soon as an atom is both excited and coupled to the cavity it emits photons into the cavity, and these can be observed as they leak out of the cavity. In this way, the coupling of an atom to the cavity can be directly observed.

In order to control the coupling of an atom to the cavity, a rotatable glass plate is placed in the optical path of the far detuned dipole trap. Tilting the glass plate induces a change in the optical path length of the trapping laser beam, and thus the standing wave propagates slowly along the beam, moving the trapped atoms in or out of the cavity mode, as we can observe in our experiments. Our control over atom-cavity coupling should enable us to create a quantum register of qubits, each individually adressable by the cavity.