State-Insensitive Cooling and Trapping of Single Atoms in an Optical Cavity

Single cesium atoms are cooled and trapped inside a small optical cavity by way of a novel far-off-resonance dipole-force trap, with observed lifetimes of 2--3 s. Trapped atoms are observed continuously via transmission of a strongly coupled probe beam, with individual events lasting 1 s. The loss of successive atoms from the trap N3210 is thereby monitored in real time. Trapping, cooling, and interactions with strong coupling are enabled by the trap potential, for which the center-of-mass motion is only weakly dependent on the atom's internal state.