Recently, the cold atom research group (led by Prof. ZHAN Mingsheng) in Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics has presented a simple method of inserting two atoms into a microscopic optical trap by dynamically reshaping the trap with a spatial light modulator. This result is published in Optics Express (21 June 2010 / Vol. 18, No. 13).

Laser cooled neutral atoms in shallow far-off resonance traps have long coherence time. The ability of trapping single atoms in microscopic far-off resonance traps (MFORT) and fully manipulating the external and internal degrees of freedom of quantum object opens a way to control the quantum state of neutral atoms, thus makes the neutral atoms be one of the most promising candidates for storing and processing quantum information.

The group members HE Xiaodong and XU Peng have presented a simple, effective and controllable method to trap two neutral atoms in a two site optical ring lattice generated by a computer controlled spatial light modulator. The ring lattice was transformed into a Gaussian trap by dynamically displaying the holograms animation movie on the modulator. The trapped atoms follow the evolution of traps and move into the same microscopic dipole trap at the end. The detected success rate of this manipulation is larger than 90%. Under imposing the near resonance light, they observed the strong light-induce collision between two atoms.