Towards a scalable dipole-trapping scheme for neutral atoms

Abstract

We present a new scheme for trapping single atoms in separate dipole-traps and manipulating them individually. It relies on a spatial light-modulator to create the traps and will find applications in cavity-QED. !2008 Optical Society of AmericaOCIS codes: 020.0020, 020.3320, 020.7010, 020.1335 IntroductionFor quantum information processing and related areas, the ultimate control of individual qubits relies on the ability to arbitrarily manipulate, address and couple individual information carriers, like single atoms or single photons. Moreover, the interfacing of atoms and photons, the storage and retrieval of single photons and the state mapping between distant atoms are the essential building blocks of scalable quantum communication and distributed quantum-information processing networks [1].Cavity-QED with neutral atoms provides a very promising physical platform for implementing most of these elementary building blocks [2,3]. However, controlling and positioning atoms in optical micro-cavities still remains a challenging task. A flexible and scalable scheme for displacing atoms in or out of optical cavities is highly desirable.Here, we report on a new dipole-trapping scheme that will allow to trap single neutral atoms in separate dipole traps and to displace them individually in a plane on a length scale of about fifty microns.

Coherent imaging of extended objects

“…From a technical point of view, however, good quality lenses (aspheric lenses, for instance) usually have a small diameter because of manufacturing constrains, and care must therefore be taken when implementing optical systems based on Eq. (7). In this section, we show that the slight difference between Eqs.…”

“…In this paper, we investigate the effect of non-isoplanatism on coherent image formation when this condition is not met. That situation may be encountered in many fields of optics where large-sized objects are imaged through powerful limited-aperture instruments, as in coherent far-field microscopy, optical lithography [5], holographic data-storage [6], and dipole-trapping of neutral atoms [7]. In particular arrays of coherently emitting point sources, like individual trapped atoms excited by the same laser beam [8,9], will be subject to the phenomena discussed here.…”