9 research outputs found
Mirror-assisted coherent backscattering from the Mollow sidebands
In front of a mirror, the radiation of weakly driven large disordered clouds
presents an interference fringe in the backward direction, on top of an
incoherent background. Although strongly driven atoms usually present little
coherent scattering, we here show that the mirror-assisted version can produce
high contrast fringes, for arbitrarily high saturation parameters. The contrast
of the fringes oscillates with the Rabi frequency of the atomic transition and
the distance between the mirror and the atoms, due to the coherent interference
between the carrier and the Mollow sidebands of the saturated resonant
fluorescence spectrum emitted by the atoms. The setup thus represents a
powerful platform to study the spectral properties of ensembles of correlated
scatterers
Injection locking of a low cost high power laser diode at 461 nm
Stable laser sources at 461 nm are important for optical cooling of strontium
atoms. In most existing experiments this wavelength is obtained by frequency
doubling infrared lasers, since blue laser diodes either have low power or
large emission bandwidths. Here, we show that injecting less than 10 mW of
monomode laser radiation into a blue multimode 500 mW high power laser diode is
capable of slaving at least 50% of the power to the desired frequency. We
verify the emission bandwidth reduction by saturation spectroscopy on a
strontium gas cell and by direct beating of the slave with the master laser. We
also demonstrate that the laser can efficiently be used within the Zeeman
slower for optical cooling of a strontium atomic beam.Comment: 2nd corrected version (minor revisions); Manuscript accepted for
publication in Review of Scientific Instruments; 5 pages, 6 figure
Microwave probes Dipole Blockade and van der Waals Forces in a Cold Rydberg Gas
We show that microwave spectroscopy of a dense Rydberg gas trapped on a
superconducting atom chip in the dipole blockade regime reveals directly the
dipole-dipole many-body interaction energy spectrum. We use this method to
investigate the expansion of the Rydberg cloud under the effect of repulsive
van der Waals forces and the breakdown of the frozen gas approximation. This
study opens a promising route for quantum simulation of many-body systems and
quantum information transport in chains of strongly interacting Rydberg atoms.Comment: PACS: 03.67.-a, 32.80.Ee, 32.30.-
Comparison between 403 nm and 497 nm repumping schemes for strontium magneto-optical traps
The theoretical description of the external degrees of freedom of atoms trapped inside a magneto-optical trap (MOT) often relies on the decoupling of the evolution of the internal and external degrees of freedom. That is possible thanks to much shorter timescales typically associated with the first ones. The electronic structure of alkaline-earth atoms, on the other hand, presents ultra-narrow transitions and metastable states that makes such an approximation invalid in the general case. In this article, we report on a model based on open Bloch equations for the evolution of the number of atoms in a magneto-optical trap. With this model we investigate the loading of the strontium blue magneto-optical trap under different repumping schemes, either directly from a Zeeman slower, or from an atomic reservoir made of atoms in a metastable state trapped in the magnetic quadrupolar field. The fluorescence observed on the strong 461~nm transition is recorded and quantitatively compared with the results from our simulations. The comparison between experimental results and calculations within our model allowed to identify the existence of the decay paths between the upper level of the repumping transition and the dark strontium metastable states, which could not be explained by electric dipole transition rates calculated in the literature. Moreover, our analysis pinpoints the role of the atomic movement in limiting the efficiency of the atomic repumping of the Sr metastable states
Solar Space Telescope Assessment study report
SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: F98B1805 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman
Long coherence times for Rydberg qubits on a superconducting atom chip
International audienceSuperconducting atom chips and Rydberg atoms are promising tools for quantum information processing operations based on the dipole blockade effect. Nevertheless, one has to face the severe problem of stray electric fields in the vicinity of the chip. We demonstrate a simple method circumventing this problem. Microwave spectroscopy reveals extremely long coherence lifetimes (in the millisecond range) for a qubit stored in a Rydberg level superposition close to the chip surface. This is an essential step for the development of quantum simulation with Rydberg atoms and of a hybrid quantum information architecture based on atomic ensembles and superconducting circuits