Freiburg 2024 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 37: Poster III

Q 37.2: Poster

Wednesday, March 13, 2024, 17:00–19:00, Tent B

Spatial Confinement of Atomic Excitation by Composite Pulses in Pr:YSO — •Niels Joseph¹, Markus Stabel¹, Nikolay Vitanov², and Thomas Halfmann¹ — ¹Institut für Angewandte Physik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany — ²Department of Physics, St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria

We experimentally demonstrate spatial confinement of atomic excitation by narrowband composite pulse sequences in Pr:YSO. In particular, we implement a variety of previously proposed sequences and compare their performance. We achieve population transfer that is spatially confined to an area significantly smaller than the diameter of the driving Gaussian-shaped laser pulses. Our experimental data agree well with a numerical simulation and confirm that the confinement improves with the number of pulses in the sequence. However, we find that inhomogeneous broadening in Pr:YSO reduces the performance, i.e., leading to the formation of additional rings around the localized centre. A theoretical treatment, confirmed by experiments, shows that the perturbing effect can be reduced by carefully choosing experimental parameters. Our experiments prove that narrowband composite pulses are a versatile tool to localize atomic excitation, potentially also below the diffraction limit. This could also be of relevance to quantum computation, as further generalized composite sequences enable arbitrary quantum gate operations in precisely confined spatial regions.

Keywords: localization; rare-earth ion-doped crystal; sub-diffraction; composite pulses; quantum gates