Hannover 2010 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 55: Poster II

Q 55.29: Poster

Thursday, March 11, 2010, 16:00–19:00, Lichthof

Cold atoms inside a hollow core fiber - a novel medium for few-photon nonlinear optics — •Sebastian Hofferberth¹, Thibault Peyronal², Michal Bajcsy², Alexander Zibrov², Vladan Vuletic¹, and Mikhail Lukin¹ — ¹Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 — ²Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, Department of Physics, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139

Typically, interactions of light beams in nonlinear media are very weak at low light levels. Strong interactions between few-photon pulses require a combination of large optical nonlinearity, long interaction time, low photon loss, and tight confinement of the light beams.

Here, we present an approach to overcome these issues that makes use of an optically dense medium containing a few hundred cold atoms trapped inside the hollow core of a photonic crystal fiber. We discuss recent experiments regarding few-photon optical nonlinearities and single atom detection inside the hollow core fiber.