100 research outputs found
Direct frequency comb measurements of absolute optical frequencies and population transfer dynamics
A phase-stabilized femtosecond laser comb is directly used for
high-resolution spectroscopy and absolute optical frequency measurements of
one- and two-photon transitions in laser-cooled \rb atoms. Absolute atomic
transition frequencies, such as the 5S F=2 \ra 7S F"=2
two-photon resonance measured at 788 794 768 921(44) kHz, are determined
without \textit{a priori} knowledge about their values. Detailed dynamics of
population transfer driven by a sequence of pulses are uncovered and taken into
account for the measurement of the 5P states via resonantly enhanced two-photon
transitions.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitte
Direct measurement of decoherence for entanglement between a photon and stored atomic excitation
Violations of a Bell inequality are reported for an experiment where one of
two entangled qubits is stored in a collective atomic memory for a user-defined
time delay. The atomic qubit is found to preserve the violation of a Bell
inequality for storage times up to 21 microseconds, 700 times longer than the
duration of the excitation pulse that creates the entanglement. To address the
question of the security of entanglement-based cryptography implemented with
this system, an investigation of the Bell violation as a function of the
cross-correlation between the generated nonclassical fields is reported, with
saturation of the violation close to the maximum value allowed by quantum
mechanics.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Minor changes. Published versio
Electromagnetically induced transparency in inhomogeneously broadened Lambda-transition with multiple excited levels
Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) has mainly been modelled for
three-level systems. In particular, a considerable interest has been dedicated
to the Lambda-configuration, with two ground states and one excited state.
However, in the alkali-metal atoms, which are commonly used, hyperfine
interaction in the excited state introduces several levels which simultaneously
participate in the scattering process. When the Doppler broadening is
comparable with the hyperfine splitting in the upper state, the three-level
Lambda model does not reproduce the experimental results. Here we theoretically
investigate the EIT in a hot vapor of alkali-metal atoms and demonstrate that
it can be strongly reduced due to the presence of multiple excited levels.
Given this model, we also show that a well-designed optical pumping enables to
significantly recover the transparency
All-optical 3D atomic loops generated with Bessel light fields
The propagation invariance of Bessel beams as well as their transversal
structure are used to perform a comparative analysis of their effect on cold
atoms for four different configurations and combinations thereof. We show that,
even at temperatures for which the classical description of the atom center of
mass motion is valid, the interchange of momentum, energy and orbital angular
momentum between light and atoms yields efficient tools for all-optical
trapping, transporting and, in general, manipulating the state of motion of
cold atoms.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure
Conditional control of the quantum states of remote atomic memories for quantum networking
Quantum networks hold the promise for revolutionary advances in information
processing with quantum resources distributed over remote locations via
quantum-repeater architectures. Quantum networks are composed of nodes for
storing and processing quantum states, and of channels for transmitting states
between them. The scalability of such networks relies critically on the ability
to perform conditional operations on states stored in separated quantum
memories. Here we report the first implementation of such conditional control
of two atomic memories, located in distinct apparatuses, which results in a
28-fold increase of the probability of simultaneously obtaining a pair of
single photons, relative to the case without conditional control. As a first
application, we demonstrate a high degree of indistinguishability for remotely
generated single photons by the observation of destructive interference of
their wavepackets. Our results demonstrate experimentally a basic principle for
enabling scalable quantum networks, with applications as well to linear optics
quantum computation.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures; Minor corrections. References updated. Published
at Nature Physics 2, Advanced Online Publication of 10/29 (2006
Coherent interaction of laser pulses in a resonant optically dense extended medium under the regime of strong field-matter coupling
Nonstationary pump-probe interaction between short laser pulses propagating
in a resonant optically dense coherent medium is considered. A special
attention is paid to the case, where the density of two-level particles is high
enough that a considerable part of the energy of relatively weak external
laser-fields can be coherently absorbed and reemitted by the medium. Thus, the
field of medium reaction plays a key role in the interaction processes, which
leads to the collective behavior of an atomic ensemble in the strongly coupled
light-matter system. Such behavior results in the fast excitation interchanges
between the field and a medium in the form of the optical ringing, which is
analogous to polariton beating in the solid-state optics. This collective
oscillating response, which can be treated as successive beats between light
wave-packets of different group velocities, is shown to significantly affect
propagation and amplification of the probe field under its nonlinear
interaction with a nearly copropagating pump pulse. Depending on the probe-pump
time delay, the probe transmission spectra show the appearance of either
specific doublet or coherent dip. The widths of these features are determined
by the density-dependent field-matter coupling coefficient and increase during
the propagation. Besides that, the widths of the coherent features, which
appear close to the resonance in the broadband probe-spectrum, exceed the
absorption-line width, since, under the strong-coupling regime, the frequency
of the optical ringing exceeds the rate of incoherent relaxation. Contrary to
the stationary strong-field effects, the density- and coordinate-dependent
transmission spectra of the probe manifest the importance of the collective
oscillations and cannot be obtained in the framework of the single-atom model.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.
Prospects for precision measurements of atomic helium using direct frequency comb spectroscopy
We analyze several possibilities for precisely measuring electronic
transitions in atomic helium by the direct use of phase-stabilized femtosecond
frequency combs. Because the comb is self-calibrating and can be shifted into
the ultraviolet spectral region via harmonic generation, it offers the prospect
of greatly improved accuracy for UV and far-UV transitions. To take advantage
of this accuracy an ultracold helium sample is needed. For measurements of the
triplet spectrum a magneto-optical trap (MOT) can be used to cool and trap
metastable 2^3S state atoms. We analyze schemes for measuring the two-photon
interval, and for resonant two-photon excitation to high
Rydberg states, . We also analyze experiments on the
singlet-state spectrum. To accomplish this we propose schemes for producing and
trapping ultracold helium in the 1^1S or 2^1S state via intercombination
transitions. A particularly intriguing scenario is the possibility of measuring
the transition with extremely high accuracy by use of
two-photon excitation in a magic wavelength trap that operates identically for
both states. We predict a ``triple magic wavelength'' at 412 nm that could
facilitate numerous experiments on trapped helium atoms, because here the
polarizabilities of the 1^1S, 2^1S and 2^3S states are all similar, small, and
positive.Comment: Shortened slightly and reformatted for Eur. Phys. J.
Efficient and long-lived quantum memory with cold atoms inside a ring cavity
Quantum memories are regarded as one of the fundamental building blocks of
linear-optical quantum computation and long-distance quantum communication. A
long standing goal to realize scalable quantum information processing is to
build a long-lived and efficient quantum memory. There have been significant
efforts distributed towards this goal. However, either efficient but
short-lived or long-lived but inefficient quantum memories have been
demonstrated so far. Here we report a high-performance quantum memory in which
long lifetime and high retrieval efficiency meet for the first time. By placing
a ring cavity around an atomic ensemble, employing a pair of clock states,
creating a long-wavelength spin wave, and arranging the setup in the
gravitational direction, we realize a quantum memory with an intrinsic spin
wave to photon conversion efficiency of 73(2)% together with a storage lifetime
of 3.2(1) ms. This realization provides an essential tool towards scalable
linear-optical quantum information processing.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
- …