Resolving and addressing atoms in individual sites of a CO2-laser optical lattice -: art. no. 051801

We report on the microscopic imaging of individual sites of an optical lattice with a period of 5.3 mum created by a retroreflected, focused CO2-laser beam. In this one-dimensional lattice, the Lamb-Dicke limit is fulfilled in all three spatial dimensions. Single lattice sites have been individually addressed with a focused near-resonant laser beam. Because of the negligible decoherence rate from spontaneous photon scattering such a lattice holds intriguing prospects for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum logic gates.