Excitation of a single atom with a temporally shaped light pulses

We investigate the interaction between a single ⁸⁷Rb atom and optical pulses with a controlled temporal envelope. In our experiment an atom is coupled to the light field by high numerical aperture aspheric lens that focuses a Gaussian beam to an atom and fixes the spatial overlap with a field. The frequency/temporal overlap can be changed by shaping the temporal envelope of an attenuated coherent pulse with fast modulators [3]. The excitation probability P_e is measured by detecting atomic fluorescence with high temporal resolution and normalizing the acquired rates by optical losses (Fig. 1).