Atom detection and photon production in a scalable, open, optical microcavity

Abstract

A microfabricated Fabry-Perot optical resonator has been used for atom detection and photon production with less than 1 atom on average in the cavity mode. Our cavity design combines the intrinsic scalability of microfabrication processes with direct coupling of the cavity field to single-mode optical waveguides or fibers. The presence of the atom is seen through changes in both the intensity and the noise characteristics of probe light reflected from the cavity input mirror. An excitation laser passing transversely through the cavity triggers photon emission into the cavity mode and hence into the single-mode fiber. These are first steps towards building an optical microcavity network on an atom chip for applications in quantum information processing.

4 pages, 4 figures. A typographical error in the published paper has been corrected (equation of the corrected normalized variance, page 3, 2nd paragraph)

References in corpus (7)

• Strongly Interacting Polaritons in Coupled Arrays of Cavities
• Quantum phase transitions of light
• Distributed quantum computation via optical fibres
• Robust creation of entanglement between ions in spatially separate cavities
• Multiatom and resonant interaction scheme for quantum state transfer and logical gates between two remote cavities via an optical fiber
• A stable fiber-based Fabry-Perot cavity
• Resonator-Aided Single-Atom Detection on a Microfabricated Chip

Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Quantum Many-Body Phenomena in Coupled Cavity Arrays
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• Heralded generation of entanglement with coupled cavities
• Trapping molecules on a chip in traveling potential wells
• Scalable cavity-QED-based scheme of generating entanglement of atoms and of cavity fields
• A Stark decelerator on a chip
• Trapping cold atoms using surface-grown carbon nanotubes
• A simple integrated single-atom detector
• An integrated atom detector: single atoms and photon statistics
• Single Atom Detection With Optical Cavities
• Stochastic master equation for a probed system in a cavity
• Atomic quantum superposition state generation via optical probing
• Towards a monolithic optical cavity for atom detection and manipulation