Bottom-up approach to room temperature quantum systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to track individual, slowly moving atoms in thermal vapors without laser cooling, demonstrating potential for scalable quantum information applications using a bottom-up approach.

Contribution

It introduces a novel photon correlation technique and passive filtering to isolate and follow single atoms in thermal vapors, advancing bottom-up quantum system development.

Findings

Successful tracking of single atoms for over 1 microsecond

Observation of Rabi oscillations in thermal vapor atoms

Passive filtering effectively selects slow-moving atoms

Abstract

We demonstrate a key ingredient in a 'bottom-up' approach to building complex quantum matter using thermal atomic vapors. We have isolated and tracked very slowly moving individual atoms without the aid of laser cooling. Passive filtering enabled us to carefully select atoms whose three-dimensional velocity vector has a magnitude below $\bar{v}/20$, where $\bar{v}$ is the mean velocity of the ensemble. Using a novel photon correlation technique, we could follow the three-dimensional trajectory of single, slowly moving atoms for $> 1\mu$s within a $25\mu$m field of view, with no obvious limit to the tracking ability while simultaneously observing Rabi oscillations of these single emitters. Our results demonstrate the power and scalability of thermal ensembles for utilization in quantum memories, imaging, and other quantum information applications through bottom-up approaches.