Abstract
We propose a quantum gas microscope for ultracold atoms that enables nondestructive atom detection, thus evading higher-band excitation and change of the internal degrees of freedom. We show that photon absorption of a probe beam cannot be ignored even in dispersive detection to obtain a signal-to-noise ratio greater than unity because of the shot noise of the probe beam under a standard measurement condition. The first scheme we consider for the nondestructive detection, applicable to an atom that has an electronic ground state without spin degrees of freedom, is to utilize a magic-wavelength condition of the optical lattice for the transition for probing. The second is based on the dispersive Faraday effect and squeezed quantum noise and is applicable to an atom with spins in the ground state. In this second scheme, a scanning microscope is adopted to exploit the squeezed state and reduce the effective losses. Application to ultracold ytterbium atoms is discussed.
Highlights
A quantum gas microscope for ultracold atoms is a powerful tool to study the dynamics and properties of quantum gases in one- or two-dimensional optical lattices [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
If we irradiate the probe light to the atom tightly confined in the optical lattice site in three dimensions formed by the magic-wavelength light of the probe transition, the probe photon absorption and subsequent spontaneous emission process predominantly occur between the vibrational ground states in the electronic ground and excited states, and the transition accompanying the change in one vibrational quantum number is suppressed by the square of the Lamb–Dicke factor z = wR W compared to the transition between the same vibrational quantum numbers [30]
We have proposed a quantum gas microscope capable of nondestructive detection of a single atom enabling a number of fascinating research inquiries
Summary
Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, 606-8502, Japan Keywords: quantum non-demolition measurement, quantum gas microscope, squeezed vacuum Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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