Andreas Fuhrmanek

Free-space lossless state detection of a single trapped atom.

We demonstrate the lossless state-selective detection of a single rubidium 87 atom trapped in an optical tweezer. This detection is analogous to the one used on trapped ions. After preparation in either a dark or a bright state, we probe the atom internal state by sending laser light that couples an excited state to the bright state only. The laser-induced fluorescence is collected by a high numerical aperture lens. The single-shot fidelity of the detection is 98.6±0.2% and is presently limited by the dark count noise of the detector. The simplicity of this method opens new perspectives in view of applications to quantum manipulations of neutral atoms.

Light-assisted collisions between a few cold atoms in a microscopic dipole trap

We study light-assisted collisions in an ensemble containing a small number (∼3) of cold 87 Rb atoms trapped in a microscopic dipole trap. Using our ability to operate with one atom exactly in the trap, we measure the one-body heating rate associated with a near-resonant laser excitation, and we use this measurement to extract the two-body loss rate associated with light-assisted collisions when a few atoms are present in the trap. Our measurements indicate that the two-body loss rate can reach surprisingly large values β > 10 −8 cm 3 s −1 and varies rapidly with the trap depth and the parameters of the excitation light.

Imaging a single atom in a time-of-flight experiment

We perform fluorescence imaging of a single 87Rb atom after its release from an optical dipole trap. The time-of-flight expansion of the atomic spatial density distribution is observed by accumulating many single atom images. The position of the atom is revealed with a spatial resolution close to 1 micrometer by a single photon event, induced by a short resonant probe. The expansion yields a measure of the temperature of a single atom, which is in very good agreement with the value obtained by an independent measurement based on a release-and-recapture method. The analysis presented in this paper provides a way of calibrating an imaging system useful for experimental studies involving a few atoms confined in a dipole trap.

Sub-Poissonian atom-number fluctuations using light-assisted collisions

We investigate experimentally the number statistics of a mesoscopic ensemble of cold atoms in a microscopic dipole trap loaded from a magneto-optical trap and find that the atom-number fluctuations are reduced with respect to a Poisson distribution due to light-assisted two-body collisions. For numbers of atoms N 2, we measure a reduction factor (Fano factor) of 0.72 ± 0.07, which differs from 1 by more than four standard deviations. We analyze this fact by a general stochastic model describing the competition between the loading of the trap from a reservoir of cold atoms and multiatom losses, leading to a master equation. Applied to our experimental regime, this model indicates an asymptotic value of 3/4 for the Fano factor at large N and in the steady state. We thus show that we have reached the ultimate level of reduction in number fluctuations in our system.

Evaporative cooling of a small number of atoms in a single-beam microscopic dipole trap

We demonstrate experimentally the evaporative cooling of a few hundred rubidium-87 atoms in a single-beam microscopic dipole trap. Starting with 800 atoms at a temperature of 125 μK, we produce an unpolarized sample of 40 atoms at 110 nK, within 3 s. The phase-space density at the end of the evaporation reaches unity, close to quantum degeneracy. The gain in phase-space density after evaporation is 10 3 . We find that the scaling laws used for much larger numbers of atoms are still valid despite the small number of atoms involved in the evaporative cooling process. We also compare our results to a simple kinetic model describing the evaporation process and find good agreement with the data.