Abstract
Atom-light interactions in nano-scale systems hold great promise for novel technologies based on integrated emitters and optical modes. We present the design architecture, construction method, and characterization of an all-glass alkali-metal vapor cell with nanometer-scale internal structure. Our cell has a glue-free design which allows versatile optical access, in particular with high numerical aperture optics, and incorporates a compact integrated heating system in the form of an external deposited ITO layer. By performing spectroscopy in different illumination and detection schemes, we investigate atomic densities and velocity distributions in various nanoscopic landscapes. We apply a two-photon excitation scheme to atoms confined in one dimension within our cells, achieving resonance line-widths more than an order of magnitude smaller than the Doppler width. We also demonstrate sub-Doppler line-widths for atoms confined in two dimensions to micron-sized channels. Furthermore, we illustrate control over vapor density within our cells through nano-scale confinement alone, which could offer a scalable route towards room-temperature devices with single atoms within an interaction volume. Our design offers a robust platform for miniaturized devices that could easily be combined with integrated photonic circuits.
Highlights
Individual atoms or atomic ensembles offer an attractive platform for quantum sensing and devices
We begin by detailing the two detection schemes used in this work. These schemes exemplify the versatility of our vapor cell design to different input beam geometries, in particular the flexibility of optical access enabled the cell geometry and integrated heater
We have illustrated the versatility of optical access afforded by our nanocell design through the methods of total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) and TPFM
Summary
Individual atoms or atomic ensembles offer an attractive platform for quantum sensing and devices. Work towards confinement of atoms and light fields on the micro- and nanoscales has increasingly offered diverse access to studying fundamental physics [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27], sensing [10,28,29,30,31,32], miniaturization of optical devices [1,7,33], and quantum technologies [34,35,36,37,38,39]. Existing works demonstrate the use of hollow-core fibers for confinement of atomic vapors in not one but two spatial dimensions These are limited to core sizes of the order of several microns. Our approach opens doors to efficient and compact architectures for performing quantum nano-optical studies
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