Sub-Poissonian atom-number fluctuations using light-assisted collisions
Sub-Poissonian atom-number fluctuations using light-assisted collisions
We investigate experimentally the number statistics of a mesoscopic ensemble of cold atoms in a microscopic dipole trap loaded from a magneto-optical trap, and find that the atom number fluctuations are reduced with respect to a Poisson distribution due to light-assisted two-body collisions. For numbers of atoms N>2, we measure …