Nanoparticle acts as a light source to make atom interferometers

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel atom interferometer using a dielectric nanoparticle as a weak light source to induce Kapitza-Dirac scattering, enabling entanglement with nanoparticle motion and potential tests of nonclassicality.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework for using a nanoparticle as a pulsed light source in atom interferometry, expanding the methods for quantum measurements.

Findings

Nanoparticle acts as a weak light source for atomic scattering.

The system can generate a Ramsey-Bordé atom interferometer.

Potential to detect nonclassicality of nanoparticle motion.

Abstract

Atomic Kapitza-Dirac (KD) scattering in the classical standing wave of lights is widely used to make the laser-pulsed atom interferometers. In this theoretical work, we show that the dielectric nanoparticle can be used as a weak light source to generate atomic KD scattering and make atom interferometer. We consider a cavity system consisting of atoms and a single nanoparticle, where the nanoparticle is illuminated by the external laser pulses. Atoms and the cavity mirrors are not illuminated by the laser beam, so nanoparticle acts as a pulsed source to excite the cavity mode which non-resonantly excites atomic internal state and generates a weak KD scattering of atomic external motion. We use twice such scattering to split atomic path and consequently use two classical laser pulses to recombine the separated paths for generating the Ramsey-Bord\'{e} atom interferometer. This atom interferometer is entangled with the centre-of-mass motion of nanoparticle and could be developed to search the small nonclassicality of motional nanoparticle, because the cavity mode excitation is associated with nanoparticle's position relative to the node or antinode of that optical mode.