Spectroscopic measurement of an atomic wave function
Abstract
We present a simple spectroscopic method based on Autler-Townes spectroscopy to determine the center-of-mass atomic wave function. The detection of spontaneously emitted photons from a three-level atom, in which two upper levels are driven by a classical standing light, yields information about the position and momentum distribution of the atom [A. M. Herkommer, W. P. Schleich, and M. S. Zubairy, J. Mod. Opt. 44, 2507 (1997)]. In this paper, we show that both the amplitude and phase information of the center-of-mass atomic wave function can be obtained from these distributions after a series of conditional measurements on the atom and the emitted photon.
Description
Journals published by the American Physical Society can be found at http://publish.aps.org/Subject
AUTLER-TOWNES SPECTROSCOPYQUANTUM STATE MEASUREMENT
PHASE-SENSITIVE
AMPLIFICATION
WIGNER FUNCTION
TRAPPED ATOM
CAVITY FIELD
SINGLE-ATOM
TOMOGRAPHY
RECONSTRUCTION
INTERFEROMETER
Optics
Physics