%0 Journal Article
%T Excitation of a single atom with exponentially rising light pulses
%A Syed Abdullah Aljunid
%A Gleb Maslennikov
%A Yimin Wang
%A Dao Hoang Lan
%A Valerio Scarani
%A Christian Kurtsiefer
%J Physics
%D 2013
%I arXiv
%R 10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.103001
%X We investigate the interaction between a single atom and optical pulses in a coherent state with a controlled temporal envelope. In a comparison between a rising exponential and a square envelope, we show that the rising exponential envelope leads to a higher excitation probability for fixed low average photon numbers, in accordance to a time-reversed Weisskopf-Wigner model. We characterize the atomic transition dynamics for a wide range of the average photon numbers, and are able to saturate the optical transition of a single atom with ~50 photons in a pulse by a strong focusing technique. For photon numbers of ~1000 in a 15ns long pulse, we clearly observe Rabi oscillations.
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3761v1