Search results for "physics.atom-ph"
showing 10 items of 395 documents
Controlling rotational dynamics of molecules by shaped ultra-short laser pulses
2004
This manuscript presents various studies falling under the set of themes of coherent control. We establish, as well theoretically as in experiments, the possibility of finely handling the rotational dynamics of linear molecules. In order to operate this handling, the ultra-short pulses are shaped by a pulse shaper. Its principle and its installation are described in a detailed way. The rotational dynamics of the linear nitrogen molecule (N2) is handled while exploiting the relative excitation between the even and odd rotational components of the wavepacket in weak mode of field. That, we chose a periodic phase modulation well defined of the exiting pulse. A temporal analysis comes to clarif…
Search for topological defect dark matter with a global network of optical magnetometers
2021
Ultralight bosons such as axion-like particles are viable candidates for dark matter. They can form stable, macroscopic field configurations in the form of topological defects that could concentrate the dark matter density into many distinct, compact spatial regions that are small compared with the Galaxy but much larger than the Earth. Here we report the results of the search for transient signals from the domain walls of axion-like particles by using the global network of optical magnetometers for exotic (GNOME) physics searches. We search the data, consisting of correlated measurements from optical atomic magnetometers located in laboratories all over the world, for patterns of signals p…
Stochastic fluctuations of bosonic dark matter
2021
Numerous theories extending beyond the standard model of particle physics predict the existence of bosons that could constitute the dark matter (DM) permeating the universe. In the standard halo model (SHM) of galactic dark matter the velocity distribution of the bosonic DM field defines a characteristic coherence time $\tau_c$. Until recently, laboratory experiments searching for bosonic DM fields have been in the regime where the measurement time $T$ significantly exceeds $\tau_c$, so null results have been interpreted as constraints on the coupling of bosonic DM to standard model particles with a bosonic DM field amplitude $\Phi_0$ fixed by the average local DM density. However, motivate…
Relaxion Stars and their detection via Atomic Physics
2019
The cosmological relaxion can address the hierarchy problem, while its coherent oscillations can constitute dark matter in the present universe. We consider the possibility that the relaxion forms gravitationally bound objects that we denote as relaxion stars. The density of these stars would be higher than that of the local dark matter density, resulting in enhanced signals in table-top detectors, among others. Furthermore, we raise the possibility that these objects may be trapped by an external gravitational potential, such as that of the Earth or the Sun. This leads to formation of relaxion halos of even greater density. We discuss several interesting implications of relaxion halos, as …
Interference-assisted resonant detection of axions
2018
Detection schemes for the quantum chromodynamics axions and other axion-like particles in light-shining-through-a-wall (LSW) experiments are based on the conversion of these particles into photons in a magnetic field. An alternative scheme may involve the detection via a resonant atomic or molecular transition induced by resonant axion absorption. The signal obtained in this process is second order in the axion-electron interaction constant but may become first order if we allow interference between the axion-induced transition amplitude and the transition amplitude induced by the electromagnetic radiation that produces the axions.
Interference-assisted detection of dark photon using atomic transitions
2019
Dark photon is a massive vector particle which couples to the physical photon through the kinetic mixing term. Such particles, if exist, are produced in photon beams and, in particular, in laser radiation. Due to the oscillations between the physical photon and the dark photon, the latter may be, in principle, detected in the light-shining-through-a-wall experiment. We propose a variant of this experiment where the detection of dark photons is based on the atomic transitions. The key feature of this scheme is that the detection probability is first order in the coupling constant due to the interference term in the photon and dark photon absorption amplitudes. We expect that such experiment …
Shuttling of Rydberg ions for fast entangling operations
2019
We introduce a scheme to entangle Rydberg ions in a linear ion crystal, using the high electric polarizability of the Rydberg electronic states in combination with mutual Coulomb coupling of ions that establishes common modes of motion. After laser-initialization of ions to a superposition of ground- and Rydberg-state, the entanglement operation is driven purely by applying a voltage pulse that shuttles the ion crystal back and forth. This operation can achieve entanglement on a sub-$\mu$s timescale, more than two orders of magnitude faster than typical gate operations driven by continuous-wave lasers. Our analysis shows that the fidelity achieved with this protocol can exceed $99.9\%$ with…
Adiabatic Elimination and Sub-space Evolution of Open Quantum Systems
2020
Efficient descriptions of open quantum systems can be obtained by performing an adiabatic elimination of the fast degrees of freedom and formulating effective operators for the slow degrees of freedom in reduced dimensions. Here, we perform the construction of effective operators in frequency space, and using the final value theorem or alternatively the Keldysh theorem, we provide a correction for the trace of the density matrix which takes into account the non trace-preserving character of the evolution. We illustrate our results with two different systems, ones where the eliminated fast subspace is constituted by a continuous set of states and ones with discrete states. Furthermore, we sh…
Atomic diffraction from nanostructured optical potentials
2002
We develop a versatile theoretical approach to the study of cold-atom diffractive scattering from light-field gratings by combining calculations of the optical near-field, generated by evanescent waves close to the surface of periodic nanostructured arrays, together with advanced atom wavepacket propagation on this optical potential.
Measurement of ultra-low heating rates of a single antiproton in a cryogenic Penning trap
2019
Physical review letters 122(4), 043201 (2019). doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.043201