Hamburg 2009 – scientific programme
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SYDI: Symposium Dissertationspreis
SYDI 1: Dissertation Prize Symposium
SYDI 1.2: Invited Talk
Tuesday, March 3, 2009, 11:00–11:30, VMP 8 HS
Cavity QED with a Bose-Einstein Condensate — •Tobias Donner1, Stephan Ritter2, Ferdinand Brennecke3, Anton Oettl4, Thomas Bourdel5, Michael Koehl6, and Tilman Esslinger3 — 1JILA, University of Colorado, Boulder CO, USA — 2Max-Planck-Institut fuer Quantenoptik, Garching, Germany — 3Institute for Quantum Electronics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland — 4Universityof California, Berkeley, USA — 5Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Palaiseau, France — 6University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
The combination of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with an ultra-high finesse optical cavity in one setup allows for a large variety of experiments.
Due to the strong coupling of individual atoms to the cavity mode, this system can be used as a highly efficient single-atom detector. We exploit the single-atom resolution to study the phase transition from a thermal gas to BEC in the critical regime. We observe how the correlation length diverges when the temperature approaches the critical temperature, and determine the critical exponent of the correlation length.
In a second set of experiments, the BEC is confined inside the cavity. This realizes a situation where we coherently couple a single mode of a matter-wave field to a single cavity mode, and effects involving more than 105 quantum degenerate atoms identically and strongly coupled to the cavity can be studied.