CONTROLLING NEUTRAL ATOMS AND PHOTONS WITH OPTICAL CONVEYOR BELTS AND ULTRATHIN OPTICAL FIBERS

Abstract

We store Caesium atoms in a 1D standing wave optical dipole trap with no more than one atom per site and sufficient spacing to individually control the properties of each atom. The Caesium ground state hyperfine levels are used as qubit states, and all single-atom qubit operations have been realized in the past already, thereby realizing a neutral atom quantum register for a bottom-up approach towards quantum information processing with neutral atoms. With a second optical dipole trap we extract atoms from their trapping sites and insert them into to other micropotentials. This allows us to regularize the spacing of stored atoms, to insert two atoms into one and the same micropotential in order to induce interactions, and to insert atoms in a controlled way into high finesse optical resonators. In a new line of research we are exploring the potential of light confined by micro-structured thin optical fibers for controlled light-matter interaction in quantum optics. We have constructed fully tunable bottle micro-resonators and we have found that we can very efficiently detect and manipulate atoms or molecules in the immediate vicinity of fibres with sub-wavelength diameters.