Improved detection of small atom numbers through image processing

Abstract

We demonstrate improved detection of small trapped atomic ensembles through advanced post-processing and optimal analysis of absorption images. A fringe removal algorithm reduces imaging noise to the fundamental photon-shot-noise level and proves beneficial even in the absence of fringes. A maximum-likelihood estimator is then derived for optimal atom-number estimation and is applied to real experimental data to measure the population differences and intrinsic atom shot-noise between spatially separated ensembles each comprising between 10 and 2000 atoms. The combined techniques improve our signal-to-noise by a factor of 3, to a minimum resolvable population difference of 17 atoms, close to our ultimate detection limit.

4 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (25)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Atomic Scattering in Presence of an External Confinement and a Gas of Impenetrable Bosons
• Direct Observation of Tunneling and Nonlinear Self-Trapping in a single Bosonic Josephson Junction
• Nonlinear atom interferometer surpasses classical precision limit
• Atom chip based generation of entanglement for quantum metrology
• Matter-wave interferometry in a double well on an atom chip
• Squeezing and entanglement in a Bose-Einstein condensate
• Implementation of Cavity Squeezing of a Collective Atomic Spin
• A new algorithm for point spread function subtraction in high-contrast imaging: a demonstration with angular differential imaging
• Mesoscopic atomic entanglement for precision measurements beyond the standard quantum limit
• An Atom Michelson Interferometer on a Chip Using a Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Long Phase Coherence Time and Number Squeezing of two Bose-Einstein Condensates on an Atom Chip
• Coherence in Microchip Traps
• Effect of cold collisions on spin coherence and resonance shifts in a magnetically trapped ultra-cold gas
• Strong saturation absorption imaging of dense clouds of ultracold atoms
• Spin self-rephasing and very long coherence times in a trapped atomic ensemble
• Two-dimensional array of microtraps with atomic shift register on a chip
• Condensate splitting in an asymmetric double well for atom chip based sensors
• Bose-Einstein Condensation in a simple Microtrap
• Spatially inhomogeneous phase evolution of a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate
• A lattice of microtraps for ultracold atoms based on patterned magnetic films
• Box traps on an atom chip for one-dimensional quantum gases
• Revealing buried information: Statistical processing techniques for ultracold gas image analysis
• Sub-Poissonian atom number fluctuations by three-body loss in mesoscopic ensembles
• Using magnetic chip traps to study Tonks-Girardeau quantum gases

Cited by in corpus (57)

• Quantum metrology with nonclassical states of atomic ensembles
• Realizing a scalable building block of a U(1) gauge theory with cold atomic mixtures
• Order from chaos: Observation of large-scale flow from turbulence in a two-dimensional superfluid
• Precision measurements of s-wave scattering lengths in a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate
• Observation of pair condensation in the quasi-2D BEC-BCS crossover
• Crossover from 2D to 3D in a weakly interacting Fermi gas
• Anomalous momentum diffusion in a dissipative many-body system
• Improved limit on the ${}^{225}$Ra electric dipole moment
• Sagnac Interferometry Using Bright Matter-Wave Solitons
• Collisions of three-component vector solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates
• Accurate Atom Counting in Mesoscopic Ensembles
• Unsupervised machine learning of topological phase transitions from experimental data
• Cooling of a one-dimensional Bose gas
• Preparation of hundreds of microscopic atomic ensembles in optical tweezer arrays
• Connecting Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless and BEC phase transitions by tuning interactions in a trapped gas
• A Single Atom Thermometer for Ultracold Gases
• Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment with two Bose-Einstein condensates
• Precision Measurement of the 87-Rb Tune-Out Wavelength in the Hyperfine Ground State F=1 at 790 nm
• Absorption Imaging of Ultracold Atoms on Atom Chips
• Stability of a trapped atom clock on a chip
• Probing spin correlations in a Bose-Einstein condensate near the single atom level
• Magnetic-film atom chip with 10 $\mu$m period lattices of microtraps for quantum information science with Rydberg atoms
• Simultaneous Readout of Noncommuting Collective Spin Observables beyond the Standard Quantum Limit
• Echo-Ramsey Interferometry with Motional Quantum States
• Tomographic reconstruction of the Wigner function on the Bloch sphere
• Mach-Zehnder interferometry with interacting trapped Bose-Einstein condensates
• Measurement of the Electric Dipole Moment of ${}^{171}$Yb Atoms in an Optical Dipole Trap
• Microtrap arrays on magnetic film atom chips for quantum information science
• Observation of the BKT Transition in a 2D Bose Gas via Matter-Wave Interferometry
• Detecting entanglement structure in continuous many-body quantum systems
• Vortex nucleation through fragmentation in a stirred resonant Bose-Einstein condensate
• Spontanous spin squezing in a rubidium BEC
• Optimized fringe removal algorithm for absorption images
• Effective statistical fringe removal algorithm for high-sensitivity imaging of ultracold atoms
• A double-well atom trap for fluorescence detection at the Heisenberg limit
• Spontaneous symmetry breaking in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates
• Equations of state from individual one-dimensional Bose gases
• Diffusive to non-ergodic dipolar transport in a dissipative atomic medium
• Collective suppression of optical hyperfine pumping in dense clouds of atoms in microtraps
• Linewidth of collimated wavelength-converted emission in Rb vapours
• Extraction and identification of noise patterns for ultracold atoms in an optical lattice
• A comparative study of deconvolution techniques for quantum-gas microscope images
• Robust inertial sensing with point-source atom interferometry for interferograms spanning a partial period
• Study to improve the performance of interferometer with ultra-cold atoms
• Measuring and manipulating the temperature of cold molecules trapped on a chip
• Inelastic collisions in radiofrequency-dressed mixtures of ultracold atoms
• Atom Number Fluctuations in Bose Gases -- Statistical analysis of parameter estimation
• In situ observation of chemistry in Rydberg molecules within a coherent solvent
• Quantum Non-Demolition Measurement on the Spin Precession of Laser-Trapped ${}^{171}$Yb Atoms
• On the fluctuations of the number of atoms in the condensate
• Surface-plasmon based dispersive detection and spectroscopy of ultracold atoms
• Sensitive Absorption Imaging of Single Atoms in Front of a Mirror
• Hanbury Brown-Twiss correlations and multimode dynamics of quenched spinor Bose-Einstein condensates
• Single atom counting in a two-color magneto-optical trap
• Calorimetry of a harmonically trapped Bose gas
• Beam Profiling with Noise Reduction From Computer Vision and Principal Component Analysis for the MAGIS-100 Experiment
• Strong light shifts from near-resonant and polychromatic fields: comparison of Floquet theory and experiment