Trapping and Rydberg Excitation of a Single Atom Qubit in a Blue Detuned Bottle

This thesis covers the first demonstration of a single neutral atom qubit trapped in a blue detuned optical dipole trap, and the use of this trap to trap Rydberg atoms. A T2 decoherence time of 42ms is achieved; process tomography of a complete set of single qubit gates is performed to show a gate fidelity of 70% to 80%; and a Rydberg trapping time longer than the spontaneous decay time is observed.;Three types of blue detuned bottle beam traps are designed and analyzed for different experimental needs. The ponderomotive energy shifts of Rydberg states in the bottle beam traps are numerically calculated and a quasi-magic trapping method is presented. Atoms are cooled by a magneto-optical trap. Single atoms are loaded into the crossed vortex bottle beam trap with a sub-Poissonian number distribution. Two phase locked 457nm lasers are used to coherently Rabi flop Cs atoms between the F = 3 and F = 4 ground states via a two-photon Raman transition. A 459nm laser and a 1038nm laser stabilized by high finesse cavities are used to drive a two photon transition between the ground state and a Rydberg state.;These preliminary results of long coherence time and Rydberg trapping time in the bottle beam trap set the ground work for future work on building a qubit array with blue detuned optical dipole traps.