Rudy Romain

Cette thèse a pour objectif d'étudier la dynamique spatio-temporelle des atomes refroidis par laser dans un piège magnéto-optique (PMO). Il a été montré qu'un nuage d'atomes froids dans le régime de diffusion multiple peut présenter un comportement instable sans modulation externe du système. Cependant, ces instabilités n'ont pas encore été modélisées de façon satisfaisante. Une nouvelle configuration du PMO a été mise en oeuvre pour tenter d'étudier des instabilités dans une seule direction. Ce PMO, qualifié d'anisotrope, n'utilise pas des lasers de mêmes fréquences dans chaque direction de l'espace. Il met en évidence les forts couplages existants entre les directions du piège, si bien qu'il n'est pas possible de l'utiliser pour réduire le nombre de dimensions dans lesquelles les instabilités s'établissent. Toutefois, cette étude constitue un premier pas vers une meilleure description tridimensionnelle du piège. Elle nous a notamment permis de mesurer la probabilité pour qu'un photon diffusé soit réabsorbé à l'intérieur du nuage. Cette quantité est caractéristique du PMO mais elle n'avait jusqu'à là jamais été mesurée. Nous avons également établi un modèle spatio-temporel unidimensionnel du PMO. Il est constitué d'un système d'équations non-linéaires couplées reliant la densité atomique et les intensités des faisceaux lasers. Ce système contient notamment une équation de Vlasov-Fokker-Planck, rencontrée dans de nombreux domaines de la physique. Des simulations numériques ont été effectuées dans un cas simple. D'un point de vue expérimental, l'utilisation d'une caméra rapide nous a permis de mettre en évidence la structure spatiale d'instabilités de type stochastique.

Magnetoencephalography based on superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) has been shown to improve the diagnosis and surgical treatment decision for presurgical evaluation of drug-resistant epilepsy. Still, its use remains limited because of several constraints such as cost, fixed helmet size, and the obligation of immobility. A new generation of sensors, optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs), could overcome these limitations. In this study, we validate the ability of helium-based OPM (⁴He-OPM) sensors to record epileptic brain activity thanks to simultaneous recordings with intracerebral EEG [stereotactic EEG (SEEG)]. We recorded simultaneous SQUIDs-SEEG and 4He-OPM-SEEG signals in one patient during two sessions. We show that epileptic activities on intracerebral EEG can be recorded by OPMs with a better signal-to noise ratio than classical SQUIDs. The OPM sensors open new venues for the widespread application of magnetoencephalography in the management of epilepsy and other neurologic diseases and fundamental neuroscience.

MagnetoEncephaloGraphy (MEG) provides a measure of electrical activity in the brain at a millisecond time scale. From these signals, one can non-invasively derive the dynamics of brain activity. Conventional MEG systems (SQUID-MEG) use very low temperatures to achieve the necessary sensitivity. This leads to severe experimental and economical limitations. A new generation of MEG sensors is emerging: the optically pumped magnetometers (OPM). In OPM, an atomic gas enclosed in a glass cell is traversed by a laser beam whose modulation depends on the local magnetic field. MAG⁴Health is developing OPMs using Helium gas (⁴He-OPM). They operate at room temperature with a large dynamic range and a large frequency bandwidth and output natively a 3D vectorial measure of the magnetic field. In this study, five ⁴He-OPMs were compared to a classical SQUID-MEG system in a group of 18 volunteers to evaluate their experimental performances. Considering that the ⁴He-OPMs operate at real room temperature and can be placed directly on the head, our assumption was that ⁴He-OPMs would provide a reliable recording of physiological magnetic brain activity. Indeed, the results showed that the ⁴He-OPMs showed very similar results to the classical SQUID-MEG system by taking advantage of a shorter distance to the brain, despite having a lower sensitivity.

We discuss the use of cold atoms in dipole traps to demonstrate experimentally a particular class of protocols for computation and metrology based on mixed states. Modelling of the system shows that, for a specific class of problems (tracing, phase estimation), a quantum advantage can be achieved over classical algorithms for very realistic conditions and strong decoherence. We discuss the results of the models and the experimental implementation.

Cold atomic clouds have been shown to have some similarities with plasmas. Previous studies showed that such clouds exhibit instabilities induced by long-range interactions. However, they did not describe the spatial properties of the dynamics. In this paper, we study experimentally the spatial nature of stochastic instabilities, and we find out that the dynamics is localized. Data are analyzed both in the spectral domain and in the spatial domain (principal component analysis). Both methods fail to describe the dynamics in terms of eigenmodes, showing that space and time are not separable.

Magneto-optical traps have been used for several decades. Among fundamental mechanisms occurring in such traps, the magnitude of the multiple scattering is still unclear. Indeed, many experimental situations cannot be modeled easily, different models predict different values of the reabsorption cross section, and no simple experimental measurements of this cross section are available. We propose in this paper a simple measurement of this cross section through the size and the shape of the cloud of cold atoms. We apply this method to traps with a configuration where theoretical values are available and show that the measured values are compatible with some models. We also apply the method to configurations where models are not relevant and show that the reabsorption is sometimes much larger than the usually assumed value.