English

Coupling a single trapped atom to a whispering-gallery-mode microresonator

Quantum Physics 2021-06-16 v1 Atomic Physics

Abstract

We demonstrate trapping of a single 85Rb atom at a distance of 200 nm from the surface of a whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonator. The atom is trapped in an optical potential, which is created by retroreflecting a red-detuned focused laser beam from the resonator surface. We counteract the trap-induced light shift of the atomic transition frequency by superposing a second laser beam with suitably chosen power and detuning. This allows us to observe a vacuum Rabi-splitting in the excitation spectrum of the coupled atom-resonator system. This first demonstration of stable and controlled interaction of a single atom with a whispering-gallery-mode in the strong coupling regime opens up the route towards the implementation of quantum protocols and applications that harvest the chiral atom-light coupling present in this class of resonators.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.07267,
  title  = {Coupling a single trapped atom to a whispering-gallery-mode microresonator},
  author = {Elisa Will and Luke Masters and Arno Rauschenbeutel and Michael Scheucher and Jürgen Volz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.07267},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

13 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:21:14.556Z