Real-time quantum feedback control with cold alkali atoms

This chapter describes recent experiments involving continuous measurement and quantum feedback control of collective spin in a cloud of cold alkali atoms. While measurement by itself can generate entanglement between different atoms in the sample by virtue of conditional spin-squeezing, the squeezed state produced in any individual instance of the measurement is randomly distributed. Incorporating real-time feedback control into the observation process suppresses the statistical dispersion of the measurement outcome so that the same a posteriori state is achieved in every instance of the feedback-stabilized measurement.