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Abstract:

We analyse a laser assisted sympathetic cooling scheme for atoms within the lowest Bloch band of an optical lattice. This scheme borrows ideas from sub-recoil laser cooling, implementing them in a new context in which the atoms in the lattice are coupled to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) reservoir. In this scheme, excitation of atoms between Bloch bands replaces the internal structure of atoms in normal laser cooling, and spontaneous emission of photons is replaced by creation of excitations in the BEC reservoir. We analyse the cooling process for many bosons and fermions, and obtain possible temperatures corresponding to a small fraction of the Bloch band width within our model. This system can be seen as a novel realisation of a many-body open quantum system. © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physlkallsche Gesellschaft.

Abstract:

We analyze a quantum optical memory based on the off-resonant Raman interaction of a single broadband photon, copropagating with a classical control pulse, with an atomic ensemble. The conditions under which the memory can perform optimally are found, by means of a universal mode decomposition. This enables the memory efficiency to be specified in terms of a single parameter, and the control field pulse shape to be determined via a simple nonlinear scaling. We apply the same decomposition to determine the optimal configurations for read-out. © 2007 The American Physical Society.

Abstract:

We propose the dynamical creation of twin Fock states, which exhibit Heisenberg-limited interferometric phase sensitivities, in an optical lattice. In our scheme a two-component Mott insulator with two bosonic atoms per lattice site is melted into a superfluid. This process transforms local correlations between hyperfine states of atom pairs into multiparticle correlations extending over the whole system. The melting time does not scale with the system size which makes our scheme experimentally feasible. © 2007 The American Physical Society.