Quantum technologies

We report on controlled doping of an ultracold Rb gas with single neutral Cs impurity atoms. Elastic two-body collisions lead to a rapid thermalization of the impurity inside the Rb gas, representing the first realization of an ultracold gas doped with a precisely known number of impurity atoms interacting via s-wave collisions. Inelastic interactions are restricted to a single three-body recombination channel in a highly controlled and pure setting, which allows to determine the Rb-Rb-Cs three-body loss rate with unprecedented precision. Our results pave the way for a coherently interacting hybrid system of individually controllable impurities in a quantum many-body system.

We report on the controlled insertion of individual Cs atoms into an ultracold Rb gas at ≈400 nK. This requires one to combine the techniques necessary for cooling, trapping and manipulating single laser cooled atoms around the Doppler temperature with an experiment to produce ultracold degenerate quantum gases. In our approach, both systems are prepared in separated traps and then combined. Our results pave the way for coherent interaction between a quantum gas and a single or few neutral atoms of another species.

In this thesis, the interactions in an unbalanced Rubidium (Rb)-Caesium (Cs) mixture are studied, where the Cs atoms have been used as probes to study the interspecies interactions. The Rb atoms are trapped and stored in a conservative potential, in an optical dipole trap and cooled to quantum degeneracy. The coherent manipulation of the spin states is realized using a microwave and radio frequency radiation to prepare the Rb atoms in the various Zeeman split hyperne levels of the ground state. Cs atoms are trapped in a MOT. An overlap of these two entities is obtained via a magnetic transport to study the interspecies interactions. The dynamics of the Cs MOT is studied in the presence of a 600nK thermal cloud of Rb, where a loss in the Cs atoms is observed. Rb remains unaected. Here, a method has been demonstrated, where the interspecies inelastic two- and three-body collisions have been investigated by monitoring the one- and two-atom loss rates in Cs. Each term in the complicated inelastic rate equation has been determined individually without having to solve the rate equation which can not be solved analytically. This is therefore, a nondestructive and simple method to extract information about the interactions and can be performed for future experiments with Cs in a conservative species specic potential.

We study cold interspecies collisions of cesium and rubidium in a strongly imbalanced system with single and few Cs atoms. Observation of the single-atom fluorescence dynamics yields insight into light-induced loss mechanisms, while both subsystems can remain in steady state. This significantly simplifies the analysis of the dynamics, as Cs-Cs collisions are effectively absent and the majority component remains unaffected, allowing us to extract a precise value of the Rb-Cs collision parameter. Extending our results to ground-state collisions would allow to use single neutral atoms as coherent probes for larger quantum systems.

We have sympathetically cooled a small sample of 133Cs atoms with 87Rb to below 1 μK. Evaporative cooling was realized with microwave radiation driving the Rb ground-state hyperfine transition. By analysing the sympathetic cooling dynamics, we derive a lower limit of the modulus of the Rb–Cs interspecies triplet s-wave scattering length of 200 a_0. For temperatures below 5 μK we observe strong non-exponential losses of the Cs sample in the presence of the Rb sample.