Faraday rotation with a single-nuclear-spin qubit in a high-finesse optical cavity

When an off-resonant light field is coupled with atomic spins, its polarization can rotate depending on the direction of the spins via Faraday rotation, which has been used for monitoring and controlling the atomic spins. We observed Faraday rotation by an angle of more than 10 deg for a single nuclear spin of 1/2 of a Yb-171 atom in a high-finesse optical cavity. By employing the coupling between the single nuclear spin and a photon, we have also demonstrated that the spin can be projected or weakly measured through the projection of the transmitted single ancillary photon.