A Single Atom Thermometer for Ultracold Gases

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel single-atom thermometer technique using Cs atoms to measure the temperature of an ultracold Rb gas, enabling local temperature probing in non-equilibrium quantum systems.

Contribution

The study introduces a single-atom thermometry method with spatial resolution, validated through simulations and independent measurements, advancing local temperature measurement in ultracold gases.

Findings

Fraction of thermometer atoms thermalizes while others remain unaffected.

Monte-Carlo simulations accurately recover the cloud's temperature after correction.

Method enables local temperature probing in non-equilibrium quantum systems.

Abstract

We use single or few Cs atoms as thermometer for an ultracold, thermal Rb cloud. Observing the thermometer atoms' thermalization with the cold gas using spatially resolved fluorescence detection, we find an interesting situation, where a fraction of thermometer atoms thermalizes with the cloud while the other fraction remains unaffected. We compare release-recapture measurements of the thermometer atoms to Monte-Carlo simulations while correcting for the non-thermalized fraction, and recover the cold cloud's temperature. The temperatures obtained are verified by independent time-of-flight measurements of the cold cloud's temperature. We also check the reliability of our simulations by first numerically modelling the unperturbed in-trap motion of single atoms in absence of the cold cloud, and second by performing release-recapture thermometry on the cold cloud itself. Our findings pave the way for local temperature probing of quantum systems in non-equilibrium situations.