Full observation of single-atom dynamics in cavity QED
- Creators
- Mabuchi, H.
- Ye, J.
- Kimble, H. J.
Abstract
We report the use of broadband heterodyne spectroscopy to perform continuous measurement of the interaction energy Eᵢₙₜ between one atom and a high-finesse optical cavity, during individual transit events of ≈250 μs duration. We achieve a fractional sensitivity ≈4×10⁻⁴/√Hz to variations in Eᵢₙₜ/h within a measurement bandwidth that covers 2.5 decades of frequency (1–300 kHz). Our basic procedure is to drop cold cesium atoms into the cavity from a magnetooptic trap while monitoring the cavity's complex optical susceptibility with a weak probe laser. The instantaneous value of the atom–cavity interaction energy, which in turn determines the coupled system's optical susceptibility, depends on both the atomic position and (Zeeman) internal state. Measurements over a wide range of atom–cavity detunings reveal the transition from resonant to dispersive coupling, via the transfer of atom-induced signals from the amplitude to the phase of light transmitted through the cavity. By suppressing all sources of excess technical noise, we approach a measurement regime in which the broadband photocurrent may be interpreted as a classical record of conditional quantum evolution in the sense of recently developed quantum trajectory theories.
Additional Information
© Springer-Verlag 1999. Received: 2 June 1998; Revised version: 4 December 1998; Published online: 31 March 1999. We wish to acknowledge Q. A. Turchette's vital participation in the early stages of this work, and to thank A.C. Doherty, C.J. Hood, and T.W. Lynn for valuable discussions. Much of the numerical work described in this paper was performed on resources located at the Advanced Computing Laboratory of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY97-22674, by the ONR, and by DARPA through the QUIC initiative (administered by ARO). Jun Ye is supported by an R. A. Millikan Fellowship from the California Institute of Technology.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 104886
- DOI
- 10.1007/s003400050751
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200810-134515530
- PHY97-22674
- NSF
- Office of Naval Research (ONR)
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
- Army Research Office (ARO)
- Robert A. Millikan Fellowship
- Created
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2020-10-20Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field