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Precision localization of single atom via spontaneous emission in three dimensions

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Abstract

We present a new scheme for high-efficiency three-dimensional (3D) atom localization in a three-level atomic system via spontaneous emission. Owing to the space-dependent atom–field interaction, the position probability distribution of the atom can be directly determined by measuring the spontaneous emission. It is found that, by properly varying the parameters of the system, the probability of finding the atom at a particular position can be almost 100 %. Our scheme opens a promising way to achieve high-precision and high-efficiency 3D atom localization, which provides some potential applications to spatially selective single-qubit phase gate, entangling gates, and quantum error correction for quantum information processing.

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Acknowledgments

The authors express their gratitude to the referee of the paper for his/her fruitful advice and comment, which significantly improved the paper. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11205001) and Doctoral Scientific Research Fund of Anhui University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Manipulation of Ministry of Education, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, China

    Zhiping Wang & Benli Yu

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  1. Zhiping Wang
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  2. Benli Yu
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Correspondence to Zhiping Wang.

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Wang, Z., Yu, B. Precision localization of single atom via spontaneous emission in three dimensions. Quantum Inf Process 14, 4067–4076 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-015-1094-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-015-1094-x

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