Progress towards cavity induced transparency

Abstract

Inspired by electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), cavity induced transparency (CIT) uses a cavity rather than a laser to couple a ground state with the excited state of a three-level system. In this thesis, I discuss the theory behind CIT and present the progress in our current experiment aimed at achieving CIT. In particular, I discuss the technical aspects of the experiment and give an overview of our experimental setup. I conclude with preliminary data on the waist-size of the sideprobe beam on the atomic ensemble trapped in an optical lattice. We measure the beam size at our ensemble to be around 5pm. Although we have not yet measured the size of the atomic cloud, we expect this beam size to be smaller than the atomic cloud, and hence our beam is maximally interacting with the atoms.