Related papers: A single-atom level mechano-optical transducer for…
We report the development of a scanning force microscope based on an ultra-sensitive silicon nitride membrane transducer. Our development is made possible by inverting the standard microscope geometry - in our instrument, the substrate is…
Ultraprecise mechanical sensors offer an exciting avenue for testing new physics. While many of these sensors are tailored to detect inertial forces, magnetically levitated (Maglev) systems are particularly interesting, in that they are…
Micromechanical transducers such as cantilevers for AFM often rely on optical readout methods that require illumination of a specific region of the microstructure. Here we explore and exploit the diffraction effects that have been…
We demonstrate Faraday spectroscopy with high duty cycle and sampling rate using atoms confined to a blue-detuned optical trap. Our trap consists of a crossed pair of high-charge-number hollow laser beams, which forms a dark, box-like…
High sensitivity detection plays a vital role in science discoveries and technological applications. While intriguing methods utilizing collective many-body correlations and quantum entanglements have been developed in physics to enhance…
We demonstrate an optical method for detecting the mechanical oscillations of an atom with single-phonon sensitivity. The measurement signal results from the interference between the light scattered by a single trapped atomic ion and that…
Optical interferometry has made tremendous development in fundamentals and applications of light. Traditional optical interferometry using simplex plane phase light just allows one dimensional measurement, but incapable of retrieving…
Many optical measurement techniques, such as light scattering from wavelength-scale particles or detecting motion from a surface with an optical lever, encode information in a complex radiation pattern. Extracting all available information…
Cellular traction forces are conventionally measured by tracking the displacement of beads or micropillars, an approach fundamentally limited by optical diffraction and the classical Euler-Bernoulli beam assumption, which is accurate only…
We demonstrate an optical frequency analysis method using the Fourier transform of detection times of fluorescence photons emitted from a single trapped 40Ca+ ion. The response of the detected photon rate to the relative laser frequency…
We show that Bloch oscillations of ultracold fermionic atoms in the periodic potential of an optical lattice can be used for a sensitive measurement of forces at the micrometer length scale, e.g. in the vicinity of dielectric surface. In…
We theoretically show that a magnet can be stably levitated on top of a punctured superconductor sheet in the Meissner state without applying any external field. The trapping potential created by such induced-only superconducting currents…
A conceptual set-up for measuring the electric field in silicon detectors by electro-optical imaging is proposed. It is based on the Franz-Keldysh effect which describes the electric field dependence of the absorption of light with an…
We propose an interferometric measurement of weak forces using a single ion subjected to designed time-dependent spin-dependent forces. Explicit expressions of the relation between the unknown force and the final populations are found…
Sensitive detection of magnetic field is one of the open problem in metrology. Here, we propose an Mach-Zehnder atomic interferometry to sensitively detect the very weak local magnetic field, which is expelled by the superconductor (as the…
Analytical solution for optical trapping force on a spherical dielectric particle for an arbitrary positioned focused beam is presented in a generalized Lorenz-Mie and vectorial diffraction theory. In this case the exact electromagnetic…
We propose a sensing scheme for detecting weak forces that achieves Heisenberg-limited sensitivity without relying on entanglement or other non-classical resources. Our scheme utilizes coherent averaging across a chain of N optomechanical…
Millimetre-wave observations represent an important tool for Cosmology studies. The Line Intensity Mapping (LIM) technique has been proposed to map in three dimensions the specific intensity due to line (e.g. [CII], CO) emission, for…
For experiments with ions confined in a Paul trap, minimization of micromotion is often essential. In order to diagnose and compensate micromotion we have implemented a method that allows for finding the position of the radio-frequency (RF)…
An excited-state atom whose emitted light is back-reflected by a distant mirror can experience trapping forces, because the presence of the mirror modifies both the electromagnetic vacuum field and the atom's own radiation reaction field.…