Atomic Fountain towards a single atom trap

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The past few decades have witnessed the development of very robust technique, known as magneto-optical trap(MOT), for cooling and trapping of neutral atoms using lasers and magnetic fields. This technique can easily produce cooled atoms to a temperature range of nano-kelvin $s^{(1)}$ . These laser cooled and trapped atoms have found applications in various fields, such as ultrahigh resolution spectroscopy, precision atomic clocks, very cold atomic collision physics, Bose-Einstein Condensation, the Atom laser, etc. Particularly, a few isolated atoms of very low temperature are needed in the cavity QED studies in the optical regime. One can obtain such atoms from a MOT using the atomic fountain technique. The widely used technique for atomic fountain is, first to cool and trap the neutral atoms in MOT. And then launch them in the vertical (1, 1, 1) direction with respect to cooling beams, using moving molasses technique. Recently, this technique combined with the cavity-QED has opened an active area of basic research. This way atoms can be strongly coupled to the optical radiation in the cavity and leads to various new effects. Trapping of single atom after separating it from MOT in the high Q-optical cavity is actively initiated presentl $y^{(2.3)}$. This will help to sharpen our understanding of atom-photon interaction at quantum level and may lead to the development of single-atom laser. Our efforts to develop an $^{85}$ Rb-atomic fountain is in progress. (omitted)