A single cesium atom is trapped in a far-off-resonance optical dipole trap （FORT） from the magneto-optical trap （MOT） and directly imaged by using a charge-coupled device （CCD） camera. The binary single-atom steps and photon anti-bunching are observed by a photon-counting-based HBT system using fluorescence light. The average atom dwelling time in the FORT is about 9 s. To reduce the background noise in the detection procedure we employ a weak probe laser tuned to the D1 line to il- lurninate the single atom from the direction perpendicular to the large-numerical-aperture collimation system. The second or- der degree of coherence g（2）（r）=0.12_＋0.02 is obtained directly from the fluorescence light of the single atom without deducting the background. The background light has been suppressed to 10 counts per 50 ms, which is much lower compared with the reported results. The measured g（2）（r） is in good agreement with theoretical analysis. The system provides a simple and effi- cient method to manipulate and measure single neutral atoms, and opens a way to create an efficient controlled single-photon source.
GUO YanQiang LI Gang ZHANG YanFeng ZHANG PengFei WANG JunMin ZHANG TianCai
A general scheme of generating NOON states of virtually-excited 2N atoms is proposed. The two cavities are fibre-connected with N atoms in each cavity. Although we focus on the case of N = 2, the system can be extended to a few atoms with N 〉2. It is found that all 2N atoms can be entangled in the form of NOON states if the atoms in the first cavity are initially in the excited states and atoms in the second cavity are all in the ground states. The feasibility of the scheme is carefully discussed, it shows that the NOON state with a few atoms can be generated with good fidelity and the scheme is feasible in experiment.
