Sub-half-wavelength atom localization via two standing waves

Abstract

We present a simple scheme of high-efficiency one-dimensional (1D) atom localization via manipulation of excited state population in a four-level inverted-Y atomic system. Because of the joint quantum interference induced by the two standing-wave fields, the 100% detecting probability of the atom in the subwavelength domain appears when the corresponding conditions are satisfied. The proposed scheme may open a promising way to achieve high-precision and high-efficiency 1D atom localization, which provides some potential applications to spatially selective single-qubit phase gate, entangling gates, and quantum error correction for quantum information processing.