Trapping atoms in the vacuum field of a cavity

C. Schoen, J. I. Cirac

Published 2002-12-11, updated 2003-03-06Version 3

The aim of this work is to find ways to trap an atom in a cavity. In contrast to other approaches we propose a method where the cavity is basically in the vacuum state and the atom in the ground state. The idea is to induce a spatial dependent AC Stark shift by irradiating the atom with a weak laser field, so that the atom experiences a trapping force. The main feature of our setup is that dissipation can be strongly suppressed. We estimate the lifetime of the atom as well as the trapping potential parameters and compare our estimations with numerical simulations.