Home › Content

Cavity-Based Single Atom preparation and High-Fidelity Hyperfine State Readout

Tue, 2011-04-26 16:23 - Donatella Rosetti
Printer-friendly versionSend by emailPDF version
Date: 
2010-05-20
Author(s): 

R. Gehr, J. Volz, G. Dubois, T. Steinmetz, Y. Colombe, B.L. lev, R. Long, J. Estève, J. Reichel

Reference: 

Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 203602 (2010)

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 readout time of 100  μs. The atom is still trapped after detection.