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

Abstract

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.

14 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• A quantum gas microscope - detecting single atoms in a Hubbard regime optical lattice
• Camparison of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect for bosons and fermions
• Energy distribution and cooling of a single atom in an optical tweezer
• Diffraction limited optics for single atom manipulation

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Spin-resolved single-atom imaging of ${}^6$Li in free space
• Evidence of sympathetic cooling of Na+ ions by a Na MOT in a hybrid trap
• Study of light-assisted collisions between a few cold atoms in a microscopic dipole trap
• Determination of weak values of quantum operators using only strong measurements
• Exotic Bohmian arrival times of spin-1/2 particles I-An analytical treatment
• Measurement of the atom number distribution in an optical tweezer using single photon counting
• Maltese cross coupling to individual cold atoms in free space
• Questioning the adequacy of certain quantum arrival-time distributions
• Spatial Light Modulators for the Manipulation of Individual Atoms
• A double-well atom trap for fluorescence detection at the Heisenberg limit
• Number-resolved imaging of ${}^{88}$Sr atoms in a long working distance optical tweezer
• Quantum control of continuous systems via nonharmonic potential modulation
• Out of equilibrium many-body expansion dynamics of strongly interacting bosons
• Time averaging of weak values - consequences for time-energy and coordinate-momentum uncertainty
• Strong quantum correlations of light emitted by a single atom in free space
• Magnetic properties and quench dynamics of two interacting ultracold molecules in a trap
• A ship-in-a-bottle quantum gas microscope setup for magnetic mixtures
• Superluminal tunneling times without superluminal signaling: Fading of the MacColl-Hartman effect at early times
• Detecting measurement-induced relative-position localisation
• Could trapped quintessence account for the laser-detuning-dependent acceleration of cold atoms in varying-frequency time-of-flight experiments?