Trapping and observing single atoms in the dark

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  • 15 February 2007
Abstract
A single atom strongly coupled to a cavity mode is stored by three-dimensional confinement in blue-detuned cavity modes of different longitudinal and transversal order. The vanishing light intensity at the trap center reduces the light shift of all atomic energy levels. This is exploited to detect a single atom by means of a dispersive measurement with 90% confidence in 0.030 ms, limited by the photon-detection efficiency. As the atom switches resonant cavity transmission into cavity reflection, the atom can be detected while scattering only a few spontaneous photons.

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