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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Abstract: The utilization of thermal atoms can enable further miniaturization and scalability of atomic devices and facilitate more applications of quantum information science in daily life. Thermal atomic beams can be easily generated and maintained compared with cold atoms. They also offer a longer coherence time and transverse Doppler-free interaction compared with thermal vapor. However, thermal atomic beams are rarely utilized in small-scale atomic devices. This thesis discussed novel approaches to generate miniature atomic beams and demonstrated their application in the field of quantum optics. The properties of our miniature atomic beam devices were characterized. Then, we studied the combination of our chip-scale atomic beams with nanophotonic resonators to achieve strong coupling in the cavity QED field. Master equation simulations were implemented to understand the dynamics, expected signal, and constraints of this platform. Efficient edge couple was demonstrated to couple free space laser beam to the chip. Besides the field of cavity QED, slow single atoms in our miniature atomic beams were isolated from our thermal atomic beam. Photon statistics from single atoms in our atomic beam were measured and studied theoretically. High values of the second-order and third-order correlation functions were found, which indicate its potential to be a source of photon pairs or triplets. Our observations showed the prospect of a bottom-up approach to building a thermal quantum system with trackable slow single atoms in an atomic beam.
