Related papers: Trap-to-trap free falls with an optically levitate…
The viscous drag on a colloidal particle pulled through solution by an optical trap is large enough that on experimentally relavant time scales the mechanical force exerted by the trap is equal and op- posite the viscous drag force. The…
Most cold atoms experiments in microgravity platforms or in Space are achieved using atom chips, leading to limitations in terms of optical access and inhomogeneous magnetic fields. Optical dipole traps do not have these drawbacks but have…
Levitation in vacuum has evolved into a versatile technique which has already benefited diverse scientific directions, from force sensing and thermodynamics to material science and chemistry. It also holds great promises of advancing the…
When introducing a nanoparticle into an optical trap, its mass and shape are not immediately apparent. We combine a charge-based mass measurement with a shape determination method based on light scattering and an analysis of the damping…
Atoms in spatially dependent light fields are attracted to local intensity maxima or minima depending on the sign of the frequency difference between the light and the atomic resonance. For light fields confined in open high-Q optical…
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel scheme to magneto-optically trap neutral atoms in a ring shaped trap that can be used to transfer atoms into a circular magnetic trap with high density. This inturn enables to evaporatively…
We recently demonstrated that strings of trapped atoms inside a standing wave optical dipole trap can be rearranged using optical tweezers [Y. Miroshnychenko et al., Nature, in press (2006)]. This technique allows us to actively set the…
Many processes in chemistry, physics, and biology involve rare events in which the system escapes from a metastable state by surmounting an activation barrier. Examples range from chemical reactions, protein folding, and nucleation events…
We investigate the nonlinear optical response of suspended 1D photonic crystal nanocavities fabricated on a silicon nitride chip. Strong thermo-optical nonlinearities are demonstrated for input powers as low as $2\,\mu\text{W}$ and a…
A new approach to the free fall experiment with UCN is proposed. The idea is that the experiment is performed with neutrons from different equidistant lines of a discrete energy spectrum with a precisely known distance between the lines.…
We propose a scheme for generating high-mass quantum superposition states of an optically pre-cooled, levitated nanoparticle through electron diffraction at its sub-nanometer crystal lattice. When a single electron undergoes Bragg…
Isolating neutral and charged particles from the environment is essential in precision experiments. For decades, this has been achieved by trapping ions with radio-frequency (rf) fields and neutral particles with optical fields. Recently,…
We trap neutral ground-state rubidium atoms in a macroscopic trap based on purely electric fields. For this, three electrostatic field configurations are alternated in a periodic manner. The rubidium is precooled in a magneto-optical trap,…
We demonstrate an optical conveyor belt for levitated nano-particles over several centimeters inside both air-filled and evacuated hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HCPCF). Detection of the transmitted light field allows…
Free electrons are unique tools to probe and manipulate nanoscale optical fields with emerging applications in ultrafast spectromicroscopy and quantum metrology. However, advances in this field are hindered by the small probability…
A new scheme of three-dimensional (3D) all-optical (nonmagnetic) cooling and trapping of resonant atoms, based on using of so-called rectified radiation forces in non-monochromatic light fields is presented. It can be applied to the atoms…
Plasmonic nanoapertures generate strong field gradients enabling efficient optical trapping of nano-objects. However, because the infrared laser used for trapping is also partly absorbed into the metal leading to Joule heating, plasmonic…
We propose a highly feasible technique with no experimental overhead to rapidly cool the in-plane degrees of freedom of large two-dimensional ion crystals in Penning traps. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our approach enables the…
In two-color optical nanofiber-based dipole traps for cold alkali atoms, the trap efficiency depends on the wavelength and intensity of light in the evanescent field, and the initial laser-cooling process. Typically, no more than one atom…
The optical properties of a fixed atom are well-known and investigated. For example, the extraordinarily large cross section of a single atom as seen by a resonant photon is essential for quantum optical applications. Mechanical effects…