Sub-poissonian loading of single atoms in a microscopic dipole trap

Nicolas Schlosser, Georges Reymond, Igor Protsenko and Philippe Grangier ()
Additional contact information
Nicolas Schlosser: Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l’Institut d’Optique, UMR 8501 du CNRS
Georges Reymond: Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l’Institut d’Optique, UMR 8501 du CNRS
Igor Protsenko: Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l’Institut d’Optique, UMR 8501 du CNRS
Philippe Grangier: Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l’Institut d’Optique, UMR 8501 du CNRS

Nature, 2001, vol. 411, issue 6841, 1024-1027

Abstract: Abstract The ability to manipulate individual atoms, ions or photons allows controlled engineering of the quantum state of small sets of trapped particles; this is necessary to encode and process information at the quantum level. Recent achievements in this direction have used either trapped ions1,2,3 or trapped photons in cavity quantum-electrodynamical systems3,4. A third possibility that has been studied theoretically5,6 is to use trapped neutral atoms. Such schemes would benefit greatly from the ability to trap and address individual atoms with high spatial resolution. Here we demonstrate a method for loading and detecting individual atoms in an optical dipole trap of submicrometre size. Because of the extremely small trapping volume, only one atom can be loaded at a time, so that the statistics of the number of atoms in the trap, N, are strongly sub-poissonian (ΔN2 ≈ 0.5N). We present a simple model for describing the observed behaviour, and we discuss the possibilities for trapping and addressing several atoms in separate traps, for applications in quantum information processing.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35082512 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:411:y:2001:i:6841:d:10.1038_35082512

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35082512

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().