Single-Photon Atomic Cooling - Raizen Lab - The University of ...
Single-Photon Atomic Cooling - Raizen Lab - The University of ...
Single-Photon Atomic Cooling - Raizen Lab - The University of ...
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
worked on by Brillouin [27–29], identified the information obtained by the<br />
demon, which it used to determine the appropriate action <strong>of</strong> the trap door,<br />
as having physical entropic content. This concept effectively exorcised such<br />
Maxwell Demons because the entropy associated with the information gathered<br />
by the demon is never less than the reduction <strong>of</strong> entropy due to the demon’s<br />
actions. This notion <strong>of</strong> information carrying entropy has become a key concept<br />
in information theory ever since [30–33]. Despite the fact that the work done<br />
by Szilard and others demonstrated that such processes do not violate any<br />
physical law, any proposal or experiment in this vein has been continued to<br />
be called a Maxwell’s Demon.<br />
<strong>Single</strong>-photon cooling is an optical realization <strong>of</strong> a Maxwell’s Demon.<br />
An atomic ensemble confined in a conservative potential is directly analogous<br />
to the ‘gas in a vessel.’ <strong>The</strong> demon analog, however, is not simply the one-way-<br />
wall alone. Rather, it is the combination <strong>of</strong> the one-way-wall and its carefully<br />
selected slow sweep through the trapped atomic ensemble. <strong>The</strong> information<br />
gathered by the demon is the single photon spontaneously scattered by each<br />
atom as it transits the barrier. To make things a little more concrete, consider<br />
the action <strong>of</strong> the single-photon cooling process on a non-interacting atomic<br />
ensemble with the well defined energy distribution fE defined such that<br />
n(E) = NfE dE (1.4)<br />
where N is the total number <strong>of</strong> atoms, and n(E) is the number <strong>of</strong> atoms with<br />
energy between E and E+dE. Figure 1.7(a) shows such an energy distribution<br />
17