Fig. 3: Dynamics of a single atom in a superoscillatory optical trap.

a A histogram and a time dependent signal (inset) of the fluorescent photons integrated in 20 ms time intervals. b The survival probability of an atom in the optical trap for superoscillatory (blue circles) with a hotspot power of 1.1 mW, and Airy profile (red diamonds) with a hotspot power of 3 mW as function of the switch-off time of the MOT beams. The blue and the red curve are exponential decay fits of the superoscillatory and Airy trap with similar trap depth, respectively. The black vertical dashed line at t = 0.39 s indicates the total time of the transfer sequence from the Airy to superoscillatory profiles and vice versa (see Supplementary Note 2). c The survival probability of an atom in the superoscillatory optical trap versus the modulation frequency of the trap beam power indicating a trapping frequency of ~50 kHz. Outside the resonance, the survival probability reads 0.76(7), where the error corresponds to one standard deviation. d The survival probability of an atom in the superoscillatory trap after switching off the trap beam for a time t (blue circles). The dashed, plain and dashed-dotted red curves show results of the survival probability modeled for an effective atomic temperature of 1.5 μK, 2.5 μK, and 3.5 μK respectively. We then deduce an effective temperature of 2.5(10) μK here, for an optical power per MOT beam of 130 μW. The inset shows the effective temperature of the atom in the superoscillatory (blue circles) and Airy hotspot (red diamond) as functions of optical power per MOT beam. The error bars represent one standard deviation of the mean. b–d Each data point corresponds to the averaged survival probability over 80 runs. The standard deviation is then estimated to be ~0.1.