Suppressed spontaneous emission for coherent momentum transfer

Abstract

Strong optical forces with minimal spontaneous emission are desired for molecular deceleration and atom interferometry applications. We report experimental benchmarking of such a stimulated optical force driven by ultrafast laser pulses. We apply this technique to accelerate atoms, demonstrating up to an average of $19$ $\hslash k$ momentum transfers per spontaneous emission event. This represents more than an order of magnitude improvement in suppression of spontaneous emission compared to radiative scattering forces. For molecular beam slowing, this technique is capable of delivering a many-fold increase in the achievable time-averaged force to significantly reduce both the slowing distance and detrimental losses to dark vibrational states.

References in corpus (10)

• Atom Interferometers
• Quantum computing with trapped ions
• Magneto-optical trapping of a diatomic molecule
• Fast and robust two-qubit gates for scalable ion trap quantum computing
• Precision Measurement of Time-Reversal Symmetry Violation with Laser-Cooled Polyatomic Molecules
• Radio Frequency Magneto-Optical Trapping of CaF with High Density
• Rotational state microwave mixing for laser cooling of complex diatomic molecules
• Demonstration of two-atom entanglement with ultrafast optical pulses
• Enhancement factor for the electric dipole moment of the electron in the BaOH and YbOH molecules
• Rotation sensing with trapped ions

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Precise pulse shaping for quantum control of strong optical transitions