nanofiber

Electrons inside an atom whip around the nucleus like satellites around the Earth, occupying orbits determined by quantum physics. Light can boost an electron to a different, more energetic orbit, but that high doesn’t last forever. At some point the excited electron will relax back to its original orbit, causing the atom to spontaneously emit light that scientists call fluorescence. Scientists can play tricks with an atom’s surroundings to tweak the relaxation time for high-flying electrons, which then dictates the rate of fluorescence. In a new study, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute observed that a tiny thread of glass, called an optical nanofiber, had a significant impact on how fast a rubidium atom releases light. The research, which appeared as an Editor’s Suggestion in Physical Review A, showed that the fluorescence depended on the shape of light used to excite the atoms when they were near the nanofiber.

If you holler at someone across your yard, the sound travels on the bustling movement of air molecules. But over long distances your voice needs help to reach its destination—help provided by a telephone or the Internet. Atoms don’t yell, but they can share information through light. And they also need help connecting over long distances.Now, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) have shown that nanofibers can provide a link between far-flung atoms, serving as a light bridge between them. Their research, which was conducted in collaboration with the Army Research Lab and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, was published last week in Nature Communications. The new technique could eventually provide secure communication channels between distant atoms, molecules or even quantum dots.

Optical fibers are ubiquitous, carrying light wherever it is needed. These glass tunnels are the high-speed railway of information transit, moving data at incredible speeds over tremendous distances. Fibers are also thin and flexible, so they can be immersed in many different environments, including the human body, where they are employed for illumination and imaging.Physicists use fibers, too, particularly those who study atomic physics and quantum information science. Aside from shuttling laser light around, fibers can be used to create light traps for super-chilled atoms. Captured atoms can interact more strongly with light, much more so than if they were moving freely. This rather artificial environment can be used to explore fundamental physics questions, such as how a single particle of light interacts with a single atom. But it may also assist with developing future hybrid atom-optical technologies.

Optical fibers are the backbone of modern communications, shuttling information from A to B through thin glass filaments as pulses of light. They are used extensively in telecommunications, allowing information to travel at near the speed of light virtually without loss.These days, biologists, physicists and other scientists regularly use optical fibers to pipe light around inside their labs. In one recent application, quantum research labs have been reshaping optical fibers, stretching them into tiny tapers. For these nanometer-scale tapers, or nanofibers, the injected light still makes its way from A to B, but some of it is forced to travel outside the fiber’s exterior surface. The exterior light, or evanescent field, can capture atoms and then carry information about that light-matter interaction to a detector.Fine-tuning such evanescent light fields is tricky and requires tools for characterizing both the fiber and the light. To this end, researchers from JQI and the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) have developed a novel method to measure how light propagates through a nanofiber, allowing them to determine the nanofiber’s thickness to a precision less than the width of an atom. The technique, described in the January 20, 2017 issue of the journal Optica, is direct and fast, but also preserves the integrity of the fiber. 

Experimental quantum physics often resides in the coldest regimes found in the universe, where the lack of large thermal disturbances allows quantum effects to flourish. A key ingredient to these experiments is being able to measure just how cold the system of interest is. Laboratories that produce ultracold gas clouds have a simple and reliable method to do this: take pictures! The temperature of a gas depends on the range of velocities among the particles: how large is the difference between the slowest- and the fastest-moving particles. If all the atoms evolve for the same amount of time, the velocity distribution gets imprinted in the position of the atoms. This is analogous to a marathon where all the runners start together so you cannot immediately tell whom is the fastest, but after some time you can discern by eye whom is faster or slower based on their location.
In some experiments, however, the cloud is so well-hidden that snapshots are near impossible. A new technique developed by JQI researchers and published in Physical Review A as an Editor’s Suggestion, circumvents this issue by inserting an optical nanofiber (ONF) into a cold atomic cloud.

Optical fibers are hair-like threads of glass used to guide light. Fibers of exceptional purity have proved an excellent way of sending information over long distances and are the foundation of modern telecommunication systems. JQI researchers in collaboration with scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory have developed a new technique for visualizing light propagation through an optical nanofiber, detailed in a recent Optica paper. The result is a non-invasive measurement of the fiber size and shape and a real-time view of how light fields evolve along the nanofiber. Direct measurement of the fields in and around an optical nanofiber offers insight into how light propagates in these systems and paves the way for engineering customized evanescent atom traps.  

Light can be confined inside a reflective medium—a stream of water, a thread of glass fiber. In fiber optics, the light moves, trapped in a glass strand via the mechanism of total internal reflection. Light “totally” bounces at the surfaces, back and forth, carrying information over vast distances. Perhaps the word total should be taken a little loosely, at least at the surface. Here, there is what’s called an evanescent field. Webster says “evanescent” means “tending to dissipate, like vapor.” In physics, an evanescent wave is a vanishing vibration, occurring at an interface.