State-Insensitive Cooling and Trapping of Single Atoms in an Optical Cavity

Abstract

Single cesium atoms are cooled and trapped inside a small optical cavity by way of a novel far-off-resonance dipole-force trap, with observed lifetimes of $2–3\mathrm{s}$. Trapped atoms are observed continuously via transmission of a strongly coupled probe beam, with individual events lasting $\simeq 1\mathrm{s}$. The loss of successive atoms from the trap $N\ge 3\to 2\to 1\to 0$ is thereby monitored in real time. Trapping, cooling, and interactions with strong coupling are enabled by the trap potential, for which the center-of-mass motion is only weakly dependent on the atom’s internal state.