In situ subwavelength quantum gas microscopy using dressed excited states
In this work, we study and demonstrate subwavelength resolutions in a quantum gas microscope experiment. The method that we implement uses the laser driven interaction between excited states to engineer hyperfine ground state population transfer on subwavelength scales. The performance of the method is first characterized by exciting a single subwavelength volume within the optical resolution of the microscope. These measurements are in quantitative agreement with the analytical solution of a three-level system model which allows to understand and predict the capabilities of this method for any light field configuration. As a proof of concept, this subwavelength control of the scattering properties is then applied to image a diffraction-limited object: a longitudinal wavefunction with a harmonic oscillator length of 30 nm that was created in a tightly confined 1D optical lattice. For this purpose, we first demonstrate the ability to keep one single site and then to resolve its nano-metric atomic density profile.