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arXiv:0911.4564 · Physical Review Letters

Spontaneous Four-Wave Mixing of de Broglie Waves: Beyond Optics

Valentina Krachmalnicoff, Jean-Christophe Jaskula, Marie Bonneau, Vanessa Y. F. Leung, Guthrie B. Partridge, Denis Boiron, Christoph Ira Westbrook, Piotr Deuar, Paweł Zin, Marek Trippenbach, Karen V. Kheruntsyan

Published Apr 15, 2010• 81 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the atom-optical analog of degenerate four-wave mixing by colliding two Bose-Einstein condensates of metastable helium. The momentum distribution of the scattered atoms is measured in three dimensions. A simple analogy with photon phase matching conditions suggests a spherical final distribution. We find, however, that it is an ellipsoid with radii smaller than the initial collision momenta. Numerical and analytical calculations agree with this and reveal the interplay between many-body effects, mean-field interaction, and the anisotropy of the source condensate.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.104.150402

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We study atom scattering from two colliding Bose-Einstein condensates using a position sensitive, time resolved, single atom detector. In analogy to quantum optics, the process can also be thought of as spontaneous, degenerate four wave mixing of de Broglie waves. We find a clear correlation between atoms with opposite momenta, demonstrating pair production in the scattering process. We also observe a Hanbury Brown and Twiss correlation for collinear momenta, which permits an independent measurement of the size of the pair production source and thus the size of the spatial mode. The back to back pairs occupy very nearly two oppositely directed spatial modes, a promising feature for future quantum optics experiments.
We study atom scattering from two colliding Bose-Einstein condensates using a position sensitive, time resolved, single atom detector. In analogy to quantum optics, the process can also be thought of as spontaneous, degenerate four-wave mixing of de Broglie waves. We find a clear correlation between atoms with opposite momenta, demonstrating pair production in the scattering process. We also observe a Hanbury Brown-Twiss correlation for collinear momenta, which permits an independent measurement of the size of the pair production source and thus the size of the spatial mode. The back-to-back pairs occupy very nearly two oppositely directed spatial modes, a promising feature for future quantum optics experiments.
We perform a theoretical analysis of atomic four-wave mixing via a collision of two Bose–Einstein condensates of metastable helium atoms, and compare the results to a recent experiment. We calculate atom–atom pair correlations within the scattering halo produced spontaneously during the collision. We also examine the expected relative number squeezing of atoms on the sphere. The analysis includes first-principles quantum simulations using the positive P -representation method. We develop a unified description of the experimental and simulation results.
A recent experiment [Deng et al., Nature (London) 398, 218 (1999)] demonstrated four-wave mixing of matter wave packets created from a Bose-Einstein condensate. The experiment utilized light pulses to create two high-momentum wave packets via Bragg diffraction from a stationary Bose-Einstein condensate. The high-momentum components and the initial low-momentum condensate interact to form a new momentum component due to the nonlinear self-interaction of the bosonic atoms. We develop a three-dimensional quantum- mechanical description, based on the slowly-varying-envelope approximation, for four-wave mixing in Bose-Einstein condensates using the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We apply this formulation to describe the experimental observations and to make predictions. We examine the role of phase-modulation, momentum, and energy conservation (i.e., phase matching), and particle number conservation in four-wave mixing of matter waves, and develop simple models for understanding our numerical results.
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Bragg diffraction of atoms by light waves can create high momentum components in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Collisions between atoms from two distinct momentum wave packets cause elastic scattering that can remove a significant fraction of atoms from the wave packets and cause the formation of a spherical shell of scattered atoms. We develop a slowly varying envelope technique that includes the effects of this loss on the condensate dynamics described by the Gross-Pitaevski equation. Three-dimensional numerical calculations are presented for two experimental situations: passage of a moving daughter condensate through a nonmoving parent condensate, and four-wave mixing of matter waves.