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The 22nd International Conference on Atomic Physics (ICAP 2010) was held from 25 to 30 July, 2010 in Cairns, Tropical North Queensland, Australia. This conference followed on from the series of highly successful biennial ICAP conferences held in Storrs, Innsbruck, Rio, Cambridge MA, Florence, Windsor, Amsterdam, Boulder, Munich, Ann Arbor, Paris, Tokyo, Seattle, Göteborg, Cambridge MA, Riga, Berkeley, Heidelberg, Boulder, Oxford and New York. ICAP 2010 was attended by 630 participants from 37 countries.

The conference presented an outstanding program of papers covering the most recent advances in atomic physics, including atomic tests of fundamental physics and basic symmetries; precision measurements, including atomic clocks, atom interferometers and fundamental constants; ultracold gases and Bose–Einstein condensates; ultracold Fermi gases; ultracold molecules; quantum simulators with atoms and ions; few-body systems; ultrafast phenomena and free electron lasers; quantum information with atoms and ions; quantum optics and cavity QED with atoms; and hybrid and optomechanical systems. The papers in this Proceedings represent a collection of the invited talks.

The conference program consisted of 48 invited talks presented in plenary sessions, including 10 'hot topic' talks highlighting the most recent advances in the field, and about 490 poster papers presented in three afternoon sessions. The program included talks by Nobel Laureates Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Wolfgang Ketterle and Bill Phillips, a memorium talk commemorating the scientific life of Vladilen Letokhov, and an evening lecture by Alain Aspect on 'Wave particle duality for a single photon: quantum weirdness brought to light'. The conference was preceded by a two-day workshop in Cairns on Variation of Fundamental Constants and Violation of Fundamental Symmetries P, T(EDM), CPT, Lorentz Invariance, organised by the University of New South Wales; and three-day Student Workshop at Cape Tribulation, organized by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics (ACQAO). A website with full details of the conference program, abstracts and other information can be found at: http://www.swin.edu.au/icap2010.

We would like to thank the participants, especially those who contributed talks, posters and manuscripts, for making ICAP2010 such an exciting and memorable conference. We thank the Program Committee for putting together an outstanding program and the ICAP International Advisory Committee for their expert advice and suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of our sponsors: the Australian National University, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics, Griffith University, the Ian Potter Foundation, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, and contributors to the trade exhibition: Coherent, Coherent Scientific, the Institute of Physics Publishing, Lastek, NewSpec, Nufern, Oxford University Press, Spectra-Physics, Springer, Toptica Photonics and Warsash Scientific. Finally, we thank our Conference Secretariat, Maria Lamari, and the Local Organising Committee for their tireless and expert efforts in the organisation of ICAP2010, and the staff of the Cairns Convention Centre, whose friendly and efficient service contributed much to the success of the conference.

The next ICAP conference is planned to be held in Palaiseau, France from 23 to 27 July 2012 (http://www.ifraf.org/icap2012).

Hans Bachor Peter Drummond Peter Hannaford Editors

Co-Chairs

Peter Hannaford, Hans Bachor

Program Committee

Local Organising Committee

International Advisory Committee

On 21 March 2009 Professor Vladilen Letokhov passed away in Troitsk near Moscow. Letokhov was an outstanding scientist in laser physics and laser spectroscopy. He was born on 10 November 1939 in the small Siberian town of Taishet, not far from Lake Baikal. After graduating from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1963, he attended the Physical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He did his postgraduate studies under the supervision of Nobel laureate Nicolay Basov. In 1969 he defended his PhD thesis on the theory of laser pulse generation and amplification, and a year later he received a second doctor of science degree in quantum radiophysics. In 1970 Vladilen went to the new Institute of Spectroscopy at the USSR Academy of Sciences in Troitsk. He became the deputy director for research and organized the department of laser spectroscopy, which he headed until his last days. Letokhov was also a faculty member at the MIPT, where he served as a professor of physics from 1972 to his death and as head of the chair of quantum optics from 1986 to 1998.

Letokhov's scientific interests included various areas of laser physics, spectroscopy, chemistry, and biomedicine. His most important contributions, however, were in the field of laser spectroscopy. He was the first to realize selective detection of atoms and molecules by multiphoton resonant ionization, which made it possible to develop methods of ultrasensitive analysis. To him belonged the discovery of nonresonance feedback in random lasers. Letokhov was also among the first to achieve laser spectroscopy with sub-wavelength spatial resolution. With his collaborators, he suggested and developed methods of laser control of atomic motion, resulting in the creation of atom traps based on gradient forces. His group carried out the first experiments on cooling, collimation, and reflection of atom beams by laser radiation.

Letokhov made decisive contributions to the development of methods of selective laser chemistry, including isotope-selective multiphoton dissociation of molecules by IR laser radiation and vibrationally mediated photochemistry. He developed several effective schemes of laser isotope separation and the first commercial plant for laser isotope separation was created in 1998. Letokhov and his coworkers performed groundbreaking experiments in laser mass spectroscopy of organic molecules, and they also developed methods of picosecond and femtosecond nonlinear laser spectroscopy for the investigation and control of ultrafast processes in condensed media. In recent years Letokhov was engaged in research on laser effects in stellar atmospheres, which he predicted at the beginning of his career.

The scientific results obtained by Letokhov and his coworkers were widely recognized. For his efforts, he was awarded the 1978 Lenin Prize, the 1998 Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physical Society, the 2001 Rozhdestvensky Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the 2002 State Prize of the Russian Federation.

For many years Letokhov was involved in the publishing of international scientific journals. Among the publications he edited were Laser Science and Technology and the Journal of Nonlinear Optics. He also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, Chemical Physics Letters, Applied Physics B, and others. He was an author on more than 850 research papers, including 15 monographs.

Letokhov was a self-made man who, beginning in his school years, persistently used every possibility to broaden his educational and cultural knowledge. Although he was devoted to science and gave it considerable time, he also was deeply interested in literature, music, art, and history. He was an exceptionally interesting conversationalist and a man of great erudition.

He is sadly missed by his many colleagues and friends.

All papers published in this volume of Journal of Physics: Conference Series have been peer reviewed through processes administered by the proceedings Editors. Reviews were conducted by expert referees to the professional and scientific standards expected of a proceedings journal published by IOP Publishing.

We use Raman coupling between magnetic sublevels of a ⁸⁷Rb BEC to create an effective vector gauge field for the neutral atoms. They behave as if they were charged particles in a magnetic vector potential. With appropriate spatial gradients and time derivatives of this vector potential we produce synthetic magnetic and electric fields for the atoms. This paper is a brief summary of the presentation made by the first author at ICAP 2010 in Cairns, Australia. It is not intended as a complete report on the research described, nor does it attempt to be a fully referenced documentation of that research and the relevant literature. Here, we provide references to the published work where a more complete description and more complete references to related literature may be found.

We investigate the non-Abelian Josephson effect in F=2 spinor Bose-Einstein condensates with double optical traps. We propose a real physical system which incorporates the non-Abelian Josephson effect and has very different density and spin tunneling characteristics compared with the Abelian case. We calculate the frequencies of the pseudo Goldstone modes in different phases between two traps, which are the crucial feature of the non-Abelian Josephson effect. We also give an experimental protocol to observe this novel effect in future experiments.

We have used an atomic ⁸⁷Rb BEC to study the emergence of quantum turbulence. The application of an external oscillating magnetic field gradient is used to nucleate vortices and anti-vortices spread over the cloud, in many directions, setting up the conditions for the turbulent regime to arise. Once the turbulence is established one may study it in a variety of its different aspects and we will present and discuss a few of these possibilities.

Bose-Einstein condensation, the macroscopic ground state occupation of a system of bosonic particles below a critical temperature, has been observed in cold atomic gases and solid-state physics quasiparticles. In contrast, photons do not show this phase transition usually, because in Planck's blackbody radiation the particle number is not conserved and at low temperature the photons disappear in the walls of the system. Here we report on the realization of a photon Bose-Einstein condensate in a dye-filled optical microcavity, which acts as a "white-wall" photon box. The cavity mirrors provide a trapping potential and a non-vanishing effective photon mass, making the system formally equivalent to a two-dimensional gas of trapped massive bosons. Thermalization of the photon gas is reached in a number conserving way by multiple scattering off the dye molecules. Signatures for a BEC upon increased photon density are: a spectral distribution that shows Bose-Einstein distributed photon energies with a macroscopically populated peak on top of a broad thermal wing, the observed threshold of the phase transition showing the predicted absolute value and scaling with resonator geometry, and condensation appearing at the trap centre even for a spatially displaced pump spot.

After a first generation of experiments has demonstrated the feasibility of forming - in a controlled manner - low-energy antihydrogen atoms via several different techniques, a second generation of experiments is now attempting to trap sufficiently cold atoms, or to form an atomic beam of antihydrogen atoms.

The goal of these experiments is to carry out comparative precision spectroscopy between hydrogen and antihydrogen, in view of testing the CPT theorem, either through 1S-2S spectroscopy or via a measurement of the hyperfine splitting of the ground state of antihydrogen. A related class of experiments combines techniques from these experiments with recent developments in the formation of positronium to test the gravitational interaction between matter and antimatter.

A significant number of challenges and limitations will still need to be overcome before precision measurements with antihydrogen become feasible, with the next significant milestones being either trapping of antihydrogen or the formation of a beam of antihydrogen.

We present recent progress in the calculation of the helium fine-structure splitting of the 2³P_J states, based on the quantum electrodynamic theory. Apart from the complete evaluation of mα⁷ and m²/Mα⁶ corrections, we have performed extensive tests by comparison with all experimental results for light helium-like ions and with the known large nuclear charge asymptotics of individual corrections. Our theoretical predictions are still limited by the unknown mα⁸ term, which is conservatively estimated to be 1.7 kHz. However, comparison with the latest experimental result for the 2³P₀ – 2³P₂ transition [M. Smiciklas and T. Shiner, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 123001 (2010)] suggests that the higher-order contribution is in fact much smaller than the theoretical estimate. This means that the spectroscopic determination of a can be significantly improved if another measurement of the 2³P₀ – 2³P₂ transition in helium-like Li⁺ or Be²⁺ ion is performed.

We have recently measured the 2S_1/2^F=1 − 2P_3/2^{F = 2} energy splitting in the muonic hydrogen atom μp to be 49881.88 (76) GHz. Using recent QED calculations of the fine-, hyperfine, QED and finite size contributions we obtain a root-mean-square proton charge radius of r_p = 0.84184 (67) fm. This value is ten times more precise, but 5 standard deviations smaller, than the 2006 CODATA value of r_p = 0.8768 (69) fm. The source of this discrepancy is unknown. Using the precise measurements of the 1S-2S transition in regular hydrogen and deuterium and our value of r_p we obtain improved values of the Rydberg constant, R_∞ = 10973731.568160 (16) m⁻¹and the rms charge radius of the deuteron r_d = 2.12809 (31) fm.

We review matter wave and clock comparison tests of the gravitational redshift. To elucidate their relationship to tests of the universality of free fall (UFF), we define scenarios wherein redshift violations are coupled to ("type II"), or independent of ("type III"), violations of UFF, respectively. Clock comparisons and atom interferometers are sensitive to similar effects in both scenarios.

We review recent activity searching for variations in the fundamental constants of nature in quasar absorption spectra and in the laboratory. While research in this direction has been ongoing for many decades, the topic has recently been stimulated by astronomical evidence for spatial variation in the fine-structure constant, α. This result could be confirmed using different quasar data and atomic clock measurements, but there are significant challenges to obtain the required accuracy. We review existing measurements and discuss some of the most promising systems where any variations would be strongly enhanced.

We consider designs of optical lattice clocks in view of the quantum statistics, relevant atomic spins, and atom-lattice interactions. The first two issues lead to two optimal constructions for the clock: a one-dimensional (1D) optical lattice loaded with spin-polarized fermions and a 3D optical lattice loaded with bosons. By taking atomic multipolar interactions with the lattice fields into account, an "atomic motion insensitive" wavelength is proposed to provide a precise definition of the "magic wavelength." We then present a frequency comparison of these two optical lattice clocks: spin-polarized fermionic ⁸⁷Sr and bosonic ⁸⁸Sr prepared in 1D and 3D optical lattices, respectively. Synchronous interrogations of these two optical lattice clocks by the same probe laser allowed canceling out its frequency noise as a common mode noise to achieve a relative stability of 3×10⁻¹⁷ for an averaging time of τ = 350 s. The scheme, therefore, provides us with a powerful means to investigate intrinsic uncertainty of the clocks regardless of the probe laser stability. We discuss prospects of the synchronous operation of the clocks on the measurement of the geoid height difference and on the search of constancy of fundamental constants.

The understanding of quantum many-body systems is one of the most daunting challenges of modern physics. Thanks to recent progress in cooling and trapping techniques, it is now possible to investigate their properties in the well controlled environment of ultra-cold gas systems. In this article, we present experimental results on the thermodynamics of strongly correlated Fermi gases and we provide a reinterpretation of the equation of state of a strongly polarized Fermi gas in terms of Fermi liquid parameters

This paper presents studies of the universal properties of strongly interacting Fermi gases using Bragg spectroscopy. We focus on pair-correlations, their relationship to the contact C introduced by Tan, and their dependence on both the momentum and temperature. We show that short-range pair correlations obey a universal law, first derived by Tan through measurements of the static structure factor, which displays a universal scaling with the ratio of the contact to the momentum C/q. Bragg spectroscopy of ultracold ⁶Li atoms is employed to measure the structure factor for a wide range of momenta and interaction strengths, providing broad confirmation of this universal law. We show that calibrating our Bragg spectra using the f-sum rule leads to a dramatic improvement in the accuracy of the structure factor measurement. We also measure the temperature dependence of the contact in a unitary gas and compare our results to calculations based on a virial expansion.

We review our recent experiments on the formation and optical trapping of LiCs molecules, which are photoassociated from a mixed ultracold gas of Li and Cs atoms. The electric dipole moment of the atoms in the lowest vibrational states is measured, yielding the predicted value of 5.5 Debye, and vibrational redistribution due to spontaneous emission and blackbody radiation is observed. We also show preliminary results on inelastic collision between optically trapped LiCs molecules and Cs atoms.

We produce an ultracold and dense sample of rovibronic ground state Cs₂ molecules close to the regime of quantum degeneracy, in a single hyperfine level, in the presence of an optical lattice. The molecules are individually trapped, in the motional ground state of an optical lattice well, with a lifetime of 8 s. For preparation, we start with a zero-temperature atomic Mott-insulator state with optimized double-site occupancy and efficiently associate weakly-bound dimer molecules on a Feshbach resonance. Despite extremely weak Franck-Condon wavefunction overlap, the molecules are subsequently transferred with >50% efficiency to the rovibronic ground state by a stimulated four-photon process. Our results present a crucial step towards the generation of Bose-Einstein condensates of ground-state molecules and, when suitably generalized to polar heteronuclear molecules such as RbCs, the realization of dipolar many-body quantum-gas phases in periodic potentials.

The two-body scattering is greatly modified in reduced dimensions. With ultracold atoms, low dimensional configurations are routinely accessible thanks to the use of optical lattices which allow confinements sufficiently strong to freeze the motion along chosen directions. With two different atomic species, we use a species-selective optical potential, in the form of a standing wave, to confine only one species in 2D disks and study the scattering between particles existing in different dimensions, i.e., we realize a 2D-3D mix-dimensional configuration, reminiscent of a brane world.

We review the scattering theory specific to this configuration and derive an effective scattering length α_eff in terms of the free-space scattering length α and the confinement parameters. We detect experimentally the enhancement of inelastic collisions arising at particular values of α and relate these values to the divergences of α_eff. Unlike the confinement-induced resonances predicted and observed for identical particles, our mixed-dimensional resonances occur in a series of several resonances, because the relative and centre-of-mass motion are coupled.

At ICAP we presented the efforts and progress at MIT towards using ultracold atoms for the realization of various forms of quantum magnetism. These efforts include a study of fermions with strong repulsive interactions in which we obtained evidence for a phase transition to itinerant ferromagnetism, the characterization of cold atom systems by noise measurements, and a new adiabatic gradient demagnetization cooling scheme which has enabled us to realize temperatures of less than 350 picokelvin and spin temperatures of less than 50 picokelvin in optical lattices. These are the lowest temperatures ever measured in any physical system.

We have used inelastic light scattering to study correlated phases of an array of one-dimensional interacting Bose gases. In the linear response regime, the observed spectra are proportional to the dynamic structure factor. In particular we have investigated the superfluid to Mott insulator crossover loading the one-dimensional gases in an optical lattice and monitoring the appearance of an energy gap due to finite particle-hole excitation energy. We attribute the low frequency side of the spectra to the presence of some superfluid and normal phase fraction between the Mott insulator regions with different fillings produced in the inhomogeneous systems. In the Mott phase we also investigated excitations to higher excited bands of the optical lattice, the spectra obtained in this case being connected to the single particle spectral function. In one-dimensional systems the effect of thermal fluctuations and interactions is enhanced by the reduced dimensionality showing up in the dynamic structure factor. We measured the dynamic structure factor of an array of one-dimensional bosonic gases pointing out the effect of temperature-induced phase fluctuations in reducing the coherence length of the system.

In recent years, ultracold atoms have emerged as an exceptionally controllable experimental system to investigate fundamental physics, ranging from quantum information science to simulations of condensed matter models. Here we go one step further and explore how cold atoms can be combined with other quantum systems to create new quantum hybrids with tailored properties. Coupling atomic quantum many-body states to an independently controllable single-particle gives access to a wealth of novel physics and to completely new detection and manipulation techniques. We report on recent experiments in which we have for the first time deterministically placed a single ion into an atomic Bose Einstein condensate. A trapped ion, which currently constitutes the most pristine single particle quantum system, can be observed and manipulated at the single particle level. In this single-particle/many-body composite quantum system we show sympathetic cooling of the ion and observe chemical reactions of single particles in situ.

Coupling internal and vibrational states of a string of trapped ions has proven to be an effective way of entangling the ions' internal states. This mechanism can be used for high-fidelity quantum gates, QND measurements of spin correlations and creation of large entangled states. However, spin-motion interactions are also of interest for the purpose of quantum simulations where the motional state no longer acts as an auxiliary quantum system only. Here, we describe an experiment where a laser-cooled trapped ion is set to behave as a free relativistic quantum particle.

Advances in the preparation and detection, but most importantly in the coherent manipulation of single neutral atoms have allowed the observation of intriguing phenomena of quantum physics in recent years. We discuss developments to prepare and detect single neutral atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice potential with single site resolution. Moreover, using two different experimental techniques, a state-dependent optical lattice potential on the one hand and a high-finesse optical cavity on the other hand, we have obtained coherent control over single neutral atoms. The former has enabled us to observe the quantum walk of atoms in position space, and to coherently control the motion of trapped atoms via microwave radiation. The latter offers a means to non-destructively detect the atomic spin state, thereby revealing quantum jumps of single atoms, or the altered optical properties of single atoms when subject to electromagnetically-induced transparency.

Room temperature atomic ensembles in a spin-protected environment are useful systems both for quantum information science and metrology. Here we utilize a setup consisting of two atomic ensembles as a memory for quantum information initially encoded in the polarization state of two entangled light modes. We also use the ensembles as a radio frequency entanglement-assisted magnetometer with projection noise limited sensitivity below femtoTesla/. The performance of the quantum memory as well as the magnetometer was improved by spin-squeezed or entangled atomic states generated by quantum non demolition measurements. Finally, we present preliminary results of long lived entangled atomic states generated by dissipation. With the method presented, one should be able to generate an entangled steady state.

Experiments performed within the last year have demonstrated Rydberg state mediated quantum gates and deterministic entanglement between pairs of trapped neutral atoms. These experiments validate ten year old proposals for Rydberg mediated quantum logic, but are only the beginning of ongoing efforts to improve the fidelity of the results obtained and scale the experiments to larger numbers of qubits. We present here a summary of the results to date, along with a critical evaluation of the prospects for higher fidelity Rydberg gates.

Superconducting circuits have been successfully established as systems to prepare and investigate microwave light fields at the quantum level. In contrast to optical experiments where light is detected using photon counters, microwaves are usually measured with well developed linear amplifiers. This makes measurements of correlation functions - one of the important tools in optics - harder to achieve because they traditionally rely on photon counters and beam splitters. Here, we demonstrate a system where we can prepare on demand single microwave photons in a cavity and detect them at the two outputs of the cavity using linear amplifiers. Together with efficient data processing, this allows us to measure different observables of the cavity photons, including the first-order correlation function. Using these techniques we demonstrate cooling of a thermal background field in the cavity.

We present an overview of experimental work to embed high-Q mesoscopic mechanical oscillators in microwave and optical cavities. Based upon recent progress, the prospect for a broad field of "cavity quantum mechanics" is very real. These systems introduce mesoscopic mechanical oscillators as a new quantum resource and also inherently couple their motion to photons throughout the electromagnetic spectrum.