The energy-level structure of a single atom strongly coupled to the mode of a high-finesse optical cavity is investigated. The atom is stored in an intracavity dipole trap and cavity cooling is used to compensate for inevitable heating. Two well-resolved normal modes are observed both in the cavity transmission and the trap lifetime. The experiment is in good agreement with a Monte Carlo simulation, demonstrating our ability to localize the atom to within λ/10 at a cavity antinode.
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0406136,
title = {Normal-mode spectroscopy of a single bound atom-cavity system},
author = {P. Maunz and T. Puppe and I. Schuster and N. Syassen and P. W. H. Pinkse and G. Rempe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0406136},
year = {2007}
}