Seth Merkel

Control and Measurement of Hyperfine Spins with Coherent Electromagnetic Fields
(Monday, 25 August, 2:15-3:00)

Abstract:

With long coherence times and well characterized control fields from the “Quantum Optics Toolbox,” cold neutral atoms provide a useful platform in which to explore methods and techniques from quantum control. We study the use of coherent electromagnetic fields to control and measure cold neutral atoms in their electronic ground state. In ¹³³Cs, the two hyperfine manifolds comprise a sixteen dimensional state space that we can manipulate with rf magnetic fields and microwaves. Additionally, we can perform polarization spectroscopy of the hyperfine spins using a laser far detuned from the excited electronic states in order to generate a continuous measurement signal. We look at three problems in this talk: state preparation, unitary synthesis from state preparation, and density matrix reconstruction from a continuous measurement record generated by a single random unitary matrix.