Measurement of the atom number distribution in an optical tweezer using single photon counting
Quantum Gases
2011-08-01 v1
Abstract
We demonstrate in this paper a method to reconstruct the atom number distribution of a cloud containing a few tens of cold atoms. The atoms are first loaded from a magneto-optical trap into a microscopic optical dipole trap and then released in a resonant light probe where they undergo a Brownian motion and scatter photons. We count the number of photon events detected on an image intensifier. Using the response of our detection system to a single atom as a calibration, we extract the atom number distribution when the trap is loaded with more than one atom. The atom number distribution is found to be compatible with a Poisson distribution.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1006.0917,
title = {Measurement of the atom number distribution in an optical tweezer using single photon counting},
author = {A. Fuhrmanek and Y. R. P. Sortais and P. Grangier and A. Browaeys},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1006.0917},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
6 pages, 5 figures