Related papers: Towards single-atom detection on a chip

All light has structure, but only recently it has become possible to construct highly controllable and precise potentials so that most laboratories can harness light for their specific applications. In this chapter, we review the emerging…

We study motion and field dynamics of a single-atom laser consisting of a single incoherently pumped free atom moving in an optical high-{\it Q} resonator. For sufficient pumping, the system starts lasing whenever the atom is close to a…

We demonstrate a method to count small numbers of atoms held in a deep, microscopic optical dipole trap by collecting fluorescence from atoms exposed to a standing wave of light that is blue detuned from resonance. While scattering photons,…

High-gain resonant nonlinear Raman scattering on trapped cold atoms within a high-fineness ring optical cavity is simply explained under a nonlinear opto-mechanical mechanism, and a proposal using it to detect frequency of micro-trap on…

Microscopically controlled neutral atoms in optical tweezers and lattices have led to exciting advances in the study of quantum information and quantum many-body systems. The light shifts of atomic levels from the trapping potential in…

We report the optical imaging of a single atom with nanometer resolution using an adaptive optical alignment technique that is applicable to general optical microscopy. By decomposing the image of a single laser-cooled atom, we identify and…

In most experiments with atoms trapped in optical lattices, the transverse size of the optical lattice beams is on the order of tens of micrometers, and loading many atoms into smaller optical lattices has not been carefully investigated.…

The problem of creating well-collimated beams of atoms escaping from a trap is studied. This problem is of high importance for the realization of atom lasers. Nonadiabatic dynamics of neutral atoms in nonuniform magnetic fields, typical of…

We consider a laser cooling and trapping of alkaline-earth and similar atoms in a bichromatic field resonant to a closed optical transition $^1S_0 \to \, ^1P_1$ or $^1S_0 \to \, ^3P_1$. It is shown that new kinetic effects emerge compared…

For several decades, ions have been trapped by radio frequency (RF) and neutral particles by optical fields. We implement the experimental proof-of-principle for trapping an ion in an optical dipole trap. While loading, initialization and…

We describe a scheme to coherently convert a microwave photon of a superconducting co-planar waveguide resonator to an optical photon emitted into a well-defined temporal and spatial mode. The conversion is realized by a cold atomic…

Large arrays of individually controlled atoms trapped in optical tweezers are a very promising platform for quantum engineering applications. However, to date, only disordered arrays have been demonstrated, due to the non-deterministic…

Interplay between the effects of coherent radiation and localization of light is analysed. A system of two-level atoms is placed in a medium interacting with electromagnetic field. The matter-light interaction can result in the appearance…

Optical detection and spectroscopy of single molecules has become an indispensable tool in biological imaging and sensing. Its success is based on fluorescence of organic dye molecules under carefully engineered laser illumination. In this…

Single atom imaging requires discrimination of weak photon count events above background and has typically been performed using either EMCCD cameras, photomultiplier tubes or single photon counting modules. sCMOS provides a cost effective…

The use of tapered optical fibers, i.e., optical nanofibers, for spectroscopy and the detection of small numbers of particles, such as neutral atoms or molecules, has been gaining ground in recent years. In this review, we briefly introduce…

In the presence of matter there is no fundamental limit preventing confinement of visible light even down to atomic scales. Achieving such confinement and the corresponding intensity enhancement inevitably requires simultaneous control over…

We propose a novel approach to the important fundamental problem of detecting weak optical fields at the few photon level. The ability to detect with high efficiency (>99%), and to distinguish the number of photons in a given time interval…

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…

Solid-state devices can be fabricated at the atomic scale, with applications ranging from classical logic to current standards and quantum technologies. While it is very desirable to probe these devices and the quantum states they host at…