arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to O. Zobay.
We give a brief overview of the way atomic physics is now developing in a way reminiscent of the optics revolution of the 1960's. Thanks in particular to recent developments in atomic trapping and cooling, the new field of atom optics is rapidly leading to exciting new developments such as nonlinear atom optics and quantum atom optics. We illustrate these developments with examples out of our own research.
We discuss a method to launch gap soliton-like structures in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates confined in optical traps. Bright vector solitons consisting of a superposition of two hyperfine Zeeman sublevels can be created for both attractive and repulsive interactions between the atoms. Their formation relies on the dynamics of the atomic internal ground states in two far-off resonant counterpropagating sigma^+ sigma^- polarized laser beams which form the optical trap. Numerical simulations show that these solitons can be prepared from a one-component state provided with an initial velocity.
In analogy to Glauber's analysis of optical coherence, we adopt an operational approach to introduce different classes of atomic coherence associated with different types of measurements. For the sake of concreteness we consider specifically fluorescence, nonresonant imaging, and ionization. We introduce definitions of coherence appropriate to them, which we call electronic, density, and field coherence, respectively. We illustrate these concepts in various descriptions of Bose-Einstein condensation, showing that each of these descriptions makes different implicit assumptions on the coherence of the system. We also study the impact of elastic collision on the field and density coherence properties of atom lasers.
Various aspects of the phase dynamics of an atom laser scheme based on binary collisions are investigated. Analytical estimates of the influence of elastic atom-atom collisions on the laser linewidth are given, and linewidths achievable in a recently proposed atom laser scheme [Phys. Rev. A 56, 2989 (1997)] are evaluated explicitly. The extent to which a relative phase can be established between two interfering atom lasers, as well as the properties of that phase, are also investigated.