Strong atom-field coupling for Bose-Einstein condensates in an optical cavity on a chip

An optical cavity enhances the interaction between atoms and light, and the rate of coherent atom-photon coupling can be made larger than all decoherence rates of the system. For single atoms, this strong coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics (cQED) has been the subject of spectacular experimental advances, and great efforts have been made to control the coupling rate by trapping and cooling the atom towards the motional ground state, which has been achieved in one dimension so far. For N atoms, the three-dimensional ground state of motion is routinely achieved in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), but although first experiments combining BECs and optical cavities have been reported recently, coupling BECs to strong-coupling cavities has remained an elusive goal. Here we report such an experiment, which is made possible by combining a new type of fibre-based cavity with atom chip technology. This allows single-atom cQED experiments with a simplified setup and realizes the new situation of N atoms in a cavity each of which is identically and strongly coupled to the cavity mode. Moreover, the BEC can be positioned deterministically anywhere within the cavity and localized entirely within a single antinode of the standing-wave cavity field. This gives rise to a controlled, tunable coupling rate, as we confirm experimentally. We study the heating rate caused by a cavity transmission measurement as a function of the coupling rate and find no measurable heating for strongly coupled BECs. The spectrum of the coupled atoms-cavity system, which we map out over a wide range of atom numbers and cavity-atom detunings, shows vacuum Rabi splittings exceeding 20 gigahertz, as well as an unpredicted additional splitting which we attribute to the atomic hyperfine structure.Comment: 20 pages. Revised version following referees' comments. Detailed notes adde

Coupling Continuous and Discontinuous Descriptions to Model First Body Deformation in Third Body Flows

International audienceThe present paper proposes an extension of the classical discrete element method used to study third body flows. Based on the concept of the tribological triplet proposed by Godet and Berthier, the aim of this work is to enrich description, by accounting for the deformation of the first body and investigating its influence on third-body rheology. To achieve this, a novel hybrid approach that combines continuous and discontinuous descriptions is used. To illustrate the advantage of such modeling, comparisons with the classical approach, which considers the first body as rigid, are performed in terms of macroscopic friction coefficient and velocity and stress profiles

Cavity-based single atom preparation and high-fidelity hyperfine state readout

We prepare and detect the hyperfine state of a single 87Rb atom coupled to a fiber-based high finesse cavity on an atom chip. The atom is extracted from a Bose-Einstein condensate and trapped at the maximum of the cavity field, resulting in a reproducibly strong atom-cavity coupling. We use the cavity reflection and transmission signal to infer the atomic hyperfine state with a fidelity exceeding 99.92% in a read-out time of 100 microseconds. The atom is still trapped after detection.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Considering New Regularization Parameter-Choice Techniques for the Tikhonov Method to Improve the Accuracy of Electrocardiographic Imaging

The electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) inverse problem highly relies on adding constraints, a process called regularization, as the problem is ill-posed. When there are no prior information provided about the unknown epicardial potentials, the Tikhonov regularization method seems to be the most commonly used technique. In the Tikhonov approach the weight of the constraints is determined by the regularization parameter. However, the regularization parameter is problem and data dependent, meaning that different numerical models or different clinical data may require different regularization parameters. Then, we need to have as many regularization parameter-choice methods as techniques to validate them. In this work, we addressed this issue by showing that the Discrete Picard Condition (DPC) can guide a good regularization parameter choice for the two-norm Tikhonov method. We also studied the feasibility of two techniques: The U-curve method (not yet used in the cardiac field) and a novel automatic method, called ADPC due its basis on the DPC. Both techniques were tested with simulated and experimental data when using the method of fundamental solutions as a numerical model. Their efficacy was compared with the efficacy of two widely used techniques in the literature, the L-curve and the CRESO methods. These solutions showed the feasibility of the new techniques in the cardiac setting, an improvement of the morphology of the reconstructed epicardial potentials, and in most of the cases of their amplitude

Impact of the Endocardium in a Parameter Optimization to Solve the Inverse Problem of Electrocardiography

Electrocardiographic imaging aims at reconstructing cardiac electrical events from electrical signals measured on the body surface. The most common approach relies on the inverse solution of the Laplace equation in the torso to reconstruct epicardial potential maps from body surface potential maps. Here we apply a method based on a parameter identification problem to reconstruct both activation and repolarization times. From an ansatz of action potential, based on the Mitchell-Schaeffer ionic model, we compute body surface potential signals. The inverse problem is reduced to the identification of the parameters of the Mitchell-Schaeffer model. We investigate whether solving the inverse problem with the endocardium improves the results or not. We solved the parameter identification problem on two different meshes: one with only the epicardium, and one with both the epicardium and the endocardium. We compared the results on both the heart (activation and repolarization times) and the torso. The comparison was done on validation data of sinus rhythm and ventricular pacing. We found similar results with both meshes in 6 cases out of 7: the presence of the endocardium slightly improved the activation times. This was the most visible on a sinus beat, leading to the conclusion that inclusion of the endocardium would be useful in situations where endo-epicardial gradients in activation or repolarization times play an important role