Strong interaction between light and a single trapped atom without a cavity

By M. Tey, Zilong Chen, S. Aljunid, B. Chng, F. Huber, G. Maslennikov, Christian Kurtsiefer. 2008 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics and 2008 Conference on Quantum Electronics and Laser Science, 2008

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We measured the extinction of a focused light beam by a single 87Rb atom localized in an optical dipole trap and found a value of 7.2% for a focused Gaussian beam resonantly interacting with an atomic two-level system. Various models describing interaction of an atom with a focused light field are compared to explain our experimental result. Our experiment suggests that a strong coupling may be achieved without cavity assistance. This opens new perspectives for a development of an efficient atom-photon interface for Quantum Information processing.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e265b1ceaf4e035c062230afcff9cf592bfa68bc

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum information with Rydberg atoms (2009, background): “…developments in achieving stronger coupling between single atoms and light in free space with tightly focused optical beams(Aljunid et al., 2009; Tey et al., 2008), as well as resolution of individual sites in short period lattices(Bakr et al., 2009) suggest that the capability of loss free,…”
Cavity-based quantum networks with single atoms and optical photons (2014, background): “Clearly, this condition is not achievable in free space, even when using tight but diffraction limited focusing of a Gaussian input mode (van Enk and Kimble, 2000; Tey et al., 2008; Wrigge et al., 2008).”
Cavity QED with atomic mirrors (2012, background): “Thus far, the available techniques to efficiently couple single photons with atomic media fall into one of the following, mostly independent, categories: i) cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) [3–5], where atomic interactions with light are enhanced via a high-finesse cavity, ii) coherent coupling ”
Quantum matter built from nanoscopic lattices of atoms and photons (2018, methodology): “(i) Tight focusing: Following the analysis of van Enk and Kimble (2001), pioneering efforts were made to tightly trap single atoms and to focus free-space beams onto them with high numerical aperture optics (Darquie et al., 2005; Tey et al., 2008; Hetet et al., 2011), as shown in Fig.”
Circuit quantum electrodynamics (2020, background): “In practice, because the scatterer emits in all directions, there is poor mode matching with the focused beam and reflection of ∼ 10% is observed with a single atom (Tey et al., 2008) and ∼ 30% with a single molecule (Maser et al., 2016).”