Resonance fluorescence of a laser-cooled atom in a non-harmonic potential

Abstract

We investigate a single laser driven atom trapped in a non-harmonic potential. We present the performance of ground-state laser cooling and Doppler cooling and the signatures of the centerof-mass motion in the power spectrum of the scattered light. In order to illustrate the results we provide two explicit examples for the confining potential: the infinite square well and the Morse potential.

Optomechanical damping basis

“…A full solution can be obtained by the spectral decomposition of the non-Hermitian Liouville superoperator generating the dynamics [11][12][13][14]. Once the eigenvalue problem is solved, one can, in principle, evaluate the time-dependent density operator of the system for any given initial condition [15][16][17][18][19], or the eigensystem can serve as the basis for a perturbative treatment of more involved problems [20][21][22][23][24]. Among the few solvable instances found in the literature, a prominent example is the damped harmonic oscillator [11,12,15,20].…”