Abstract

The interest in optical dipole traps as an elegant and simple way to store laser-cooled neutral atoms has rapidly increased within the last few years Far-off-resonance optical dipole traps can confine atoms in all ground states for a long time with a very small ground state relaxation time. In contrast to previous work, the trap presented here describes experiments performed with a few atoms, with the atom number ranging from 1 to 10. The precise control of a deterministic number of atoms is crucial in many experiments e g. in cavity QED and quantum information processing

© 2000 IEEE