Cavity cooling and normal-mode spectroscopy of a bound atom-cavity system

Full text: Single atoms strongly coupled to the field of an optical cavity form an attractive system for the realization of an atom-light interface useful for quantum information protocols. An experimental implementation of these schemes requires atoms which are trapped, cooled and localized in the cavity mode at a region of strong coupling. In the experiment presented here, single atoms are trapped and stored in a far-detuned intracavity dipole trap. We demonstrate cavity cooling by illuminating the system with a weak, slightly blue-detuned light beam. This extends the storage time of an atom, which is limited by parametric heating from fluctuations of the intracavity dipole trap, by more than a factor of two. The observed cooling force is of Sisyphus-type and was predicted. A special feature of this force is that it does not rely on the spontaneous emission of a photon by the atom, and therefore the cooling force is at least five times larger than the force achievable for free-space cooling methods with comparable excitation of a two-level atom. Preparing single atoms strongly-coupled to the mode of a high-finesse cavity in this way, we observe two well-resolved normal-mode peaks both in transmission of the cavity as well as in the trap lifetime. The experimental data agree well with a Monte Carlo simulation, demonstrating the localization of the atom to within a tenth of a wavelength at a cavity antinode. The ability to individually excite the normal modes of a bound atom-cavity system shows that we have reached good control over this fundamental quantum system. (author)