Professor Andrew Daley

Abstract:

A scheme to cool the motional state of neutral atoms confined in sites of an optical lattice by immersing the system in a superfluid was analyzed. It was shown that the motion of the atoms is damped by the generation of excitations in the superfluid, and under appropriate conditions the internal state of the atom remains unchanged. It was found that the scheme can be used to cool atoms used to encode a series of entangle qubits nondestructively. The rate of cooling to the ground state was found to be sufficiently large to be useful in experiments, within realizable parameter ranges.

Abstract:

We present a coherent filtering scheme which dramatically reduces the site occupation number defects for atoms in an optical lattice by transferring a chosen number of atoms to a different internal state via adiabatic passage. With the addition of superlattices it is possible to engineer states with a specific number of atoms per site (atomic crystals), which are required for quantum computation and the realization of models from condensed matter physics, including doping and spatial patterns. The same techniques can be used to measure two-body spatial correlation functions.