22,468 research outputs found
Search for Free Decay of Negative Pions in Water and Light Materials
We report on a search for the free decay component of pi- stopped in water
and light materials. A non-zero value of this would be an indication of
anomalous nu_e contamination to the nu_e and nu_mu_bar production at
stopped-pion neutrino facilities. No free decay component of pi- was observed
in water, Beryllium, and Aluminum, for which upper limits were established at
8.2E-4, 3.2E-3, and 7.7E-3, respectively
Single-particle-sensitive imaging of freely propagating ultracold atoms
We present a novel imaging system for ultracold quantum gases in expansion.
After release from a confining potential, atoms fall through a sheet of
resonant excitation laser light and the emitted fluorescence photons are imaged
onto an amplified CCD camera using a high numerical aperture optical system.
The imaging system reaches an extraordinary dynamic range, not attainable with
conventional absorption imaging. We demonstrate single-atom detection for
dilute atomic clouds with high efficiency where at the same time dense
Bose-Einstein condensates can be imaged without saturation or distortion. The
spatial resolution can reach the sampling limit as given by the 8 \mu m pixel
size in object space. Pulsed operation of the detector allows for slice images,
a first step toward a 3D tomography of the measured object. The scheme can
easily be implemented for any atomic species and all optical components are
situated outside the vacuum system. As a first application we perform
thermometry on rubidium Bose-Einstein condensates created on an atom chip.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures. v2: as publishe
Subradiance in a Large Cloud of Cold Atoms
Since Dicke's seminal paper on coherence in spontaneous radiation by atomic
ensembles, superradiance has been extensively studied. Subradiance, on the
contrary, has remained elusive, mainly because subradiant states are weakly
coupled to the environment and are very sensitive to nonradiative decoherence
processes.Here we report the experimental observation of subradiance in an
extended and dilute cold-atom sample containing a large number of particles. We
use a far detuned laser to avoid multiple scattering and observe the temporal
decay after a sudden switch-off of the laser beam. After the fast decay of most
of the fluorescence, we detect a very slow decay, with time constants as long
as 100 times the natural lifetime of the excited state of individual atoms.
This subradiant time constant scales linearly with the cooperativity parameter,
corresponding to the on-resonance optical depth of the sample, and is
independent of the laser detuning, as expected from a coupled-dipole model
A reversible infinite HMM using normalised random measures
We present a nonparametric prior over reversible Markov chains. We use
completely random measures, specifically gamma processes, to construct a
countably infinite graph with weighted edges. By enforcing symmetry to make the
edges undirected we define a prior over random walks on graphs that results in
a reversible Markov chain. The resulting prior over infinite transition
matrices is closely related to the hierarchical Dirichlet process but enforces
reversibility. A reinforcement scheme has recently been proposed with similar
properties, but the de Finetti measure is not well characterised. We take the
alternative approach of explicitly constructing the mixing measure, which
allows more straightforward and efficient inference at the cost of no longer
having a closed form predictive distribution. We use our process to construct a
reversible infinite HMM which we apply to two real datasets, one from
epigenomics and one ion channel recording.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure
Delayed-choice gedanken experiments and their realizations
The wave-particle duality dates back to Einstein's explanation of the
photoelectric effect through quanta of light and de Broglie's hypothesis of
matter waves. Quantum mechanics uses an abstract description for the behavior
of physical systems such as photons, electrons, or atoms. Whether quantum
predictions for single systems in an interferometric experiment allow an
intuitive understanding in terms of the particle or wave picture, depends on
the specific configuration which is being used. In principle, this leaves open
the possibility that quantum systems always either behave definitely as a
particle or definitely as a wave in every experimental run by a priori adapting
to the specific experimental situation. This is precisely what is tried to be
excluded by delayed-choice experiments, in which the observer chooses to reveal
the particle or wave character -- or even a continuous transformation between
the two -- of a quantum system at a late stage of the experiment. We review the
history of delayed-choice gedanken experiments, which can be traced back to the
early days of quantum mechanics. Then we discuss their experimental
realizations, in particular Wheeler's delayed choice in interferometric setups
as well as delayed-choice quantum erasure and entanglement swapping. The latter
is particularly interesting, because it elevates the wave-particle duality of a
single quantum system to an entanglement-separability duality of multiple
systems
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