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Theory of atom-molecule Bose-Einstein condensate

Marijan Koštrun

Published Jan 1, 2002• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

A study of coherent photoassociation is presented for the case of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. It is shown that the phenomenon is analogous to coherent optical transient in a few-level system, with a difference that the participating levels have Bose enhanced populations. A second-quantized Hamiltonian in momentum and position representation is developed to describe photoassociation. A classical version of the field theory for atoms and molecules is used to demonstrate that in the presence of photoassociating light, a joint atom-molecule condensate is unstable against the growth of the density fluctuations. ^ A simple mean-field model of atom-molecule Bose-Einstein condensate is constructed and it is shown that in the model there is no collapse, irrespective of the sign of the effective atom-atom scattering length. The properties of the two most important eigenstates, the ground state and the twin state, are determined for different values of the system parameters δ and K, the detuning and the atom-molecule coupling, respectively. It is shown that in a coupled atom-molecule system a collapse is replaced by a dynamical instability. The lines in the parameter space where these instabilities occur are in fact fractures where the underlying eigenstates discontinuously change. The features of instability are in good qualitative agreement with the experimental observations of collapse. ^

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arXiv:cond-mat/0105439•Physical Review A•Nov 16, 2001•130 citations
A study of coherent photoassociation is presented for the case of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. It is shown that the phenomenon is analogous to coherent optical transient in a few-level system, with a difference that the participating levels have Bose enhanced populations. A second-quantized Hamiltonian in momentum and position representation is developed to describe photoassociation. A classical version of the field theory for atoms and molecules is used to demonstrate that in the presence of photoassociating light, a joint atom-molecule condensate is unstable against the growth of the density fluctuations. ^ A simple mean-field model of atom-molecule Bose-Einstein condensate is constructed and it is shown that in the model there is no collapse, irrespective of the sign of the effective atom-atom scattering length. The properties of the two most important eigenstates, the ground state and the twin state, are determined for different values of the system parameters δ and K, the detuning and the atom-molecule coupling, respectively. It is shown that in a coupled atom-molecule system a collapse is replaced by a dynamical instability. The lines in the parameter space where these instabilities occur are in fact fractures where the underlying eigenstates discontinuously change. The features of instability are in good qualitative agreement with the experimental observations of collapse. ^
We study coherent photoassociation, phenomena analogous to coherent optical transients in few-level systems, which may take place in photoassociation of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate but not in a nondegenerate gas. We develop a second-quantized Hamiltonian to describe photoassociation, and apply the Hamiltonian both in the momentum representation and in the position representation (field theory). The solution of the two-mode problem, including only one mode each for the atomic and molecular condensates, displays analogs of Rabi oscillations and rapid adiabatic passage. A classical version of the field theory for atoms and molecules is used to demonstrate that, in the presence of photoassociating light, a joint atom-molecule condensate is unstable against the growth of density fluctuations. Experimental complications, including spontaneous emission and unwanted ``rogue'' photodissociation from a photoassociated molecule, are analyzed. A two-color Raman scheme is studied as a method to set up an effective two-mode scheme with reduced spontaneous-emission losses. We discuss photoassociation rates and photoassociation Rabi frequencies for high-lying vibrational states in alkali dimers both on the basis of molecular-structure calculations, and by comparing with an experiment [Wynar et al., Science 287, 1016 (2000)].
We consider the process of photoassociation (PA) that occurs when a pair of colliding atoms interacts with a photon, thereby making a transition from the two-atom continuum to a bound molecular state. Such free-bound transitions are described by quantizing the molecule's dissociation continuum, and coupling each of these quasicontinuum (QC) levels to a similarly discrete molecular level. The correct free-atom results are recovered no later than at the end of a given calculation by taking the limit as the QC spacing tends to zero. From the quasicontinuum model, we are led to adapt the few-level and second-quantization methods of photon optics to analyze free-bound transitions. In particular, we establish the PA density parameter as nearly identical to the phase-space parameter as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), illustrate the near-unit efficiency of one- and two-color photoassociation of a BEC, and develop coherent atom-molecule transitions as the matter optics version of second-harmonic generated photons. ^
We explore the quantum dynamics of photoassociation of Bose-Einstein condensed atoms into molecules using an optical cavity field. Inside of an optical resonator, photoassociation of quantum degenerate atoms involves the interaction of three coupled quantum fields for the atoms, molecules, and the photons. The feedback created by a high-QQQ optical cavity causes the cavity field to become a dynamical quantity whose behavior is linked in a nonlinear manner to the atoms inside and where vacuum fluctuations have a more important role than in free space. We develop and compare several methods for calculating the dynamics of the atom-molecule conversion process with a coherently driven cavity field. We first present an alternate operator representation for the Hamiltonian from which we derive an improved form of mean field theory and an approximate solution of the Heisenberg-Langevin (HL) equations that properly accounts for quantum noise in the cavity field. It is shown that our improved mean field theory corrects several deficiencies in traditional mean field theory based on expectation values of annihilation and creation operators. Also, we show by direct comparison to numerical solutions of the density matrix equations that our approximate quantum solution of HL equations gives an accurate description of weakly or undriven cavities where mean field theories break down.
A dynamical many-body theory of single color photoassociation in a Bose-Einstein condensate is presented. The theory describes the time evolution of a condensed atomic ensemble under the influence of an arbitrarily varying near-resonant laser pulse, which strongly modifies the binary scattering properties. In particular, when considering situations with rapid variations and high light intensities the approach described in this article leads, in a consistent way, beyond standard mean-field techniques. This allows one to address the question of limits to the photoassociation rate due to many-body effects which has caused extensive discussions in the recent past. Both the possible loss rate of condensate atoms and the amount of stable ground-state molecules achievable within a certain time are found to be stronger limited than according to mean-field theory. By systematically treating the dynamics of the connected Green's function for pair correlations the resonantly driven population of the excited molecular state as well as scattering into the continuum of noncondensed atomic states are taken into account. A detailed analysis of the low-energy stationary scattering properties of two atoms modified by the near resonant photoassociation laser, in particular of the dressed state spectrum of the relative motion prepares for the analysis of the many-body dynamics. The consequences of the finite lifetime of the resonantly coupled bound state are discussed in the two-body as well as in the many-body context. Extending the two body description to scattering in a tight trap reveals the modifications to the near resonant adiabatic dressed levels caused by the decay of the excited molecular state.
We study the system of coupled atomic and molecular condensates within the two-mode model and beyond mean-field theory. Large-amplitude atom-molecule coherent oscillations are shown to be damped by the rapid growth of fluctuations near the dynamically unstable molecular mode. This result contradicts earlier predictions about the recovery of atom-molecule oscillations in the two-mode limit. The frequency of the damped oscillation is also shown to scale as N/lnN\sqrt{N}/\mathrm{ln}NN​/lnN with the total number of atoms N, rather than the expected pure N\sqrt{N}N​ scaling. Using a linearized model, we obtain analytical expressions for the initial depletion of the molecular condensate in the vicinity of the instability, and show that the important effect neglected by mean-field theory is an initially nonexponential ``spontaneous'' dissociation into the atomic vacuum. Starting with a small population in the atomic mode, the initial dissociation rate is sensitive to the exact atomic amplitudes, with the fastest (superexponential) rate observed for the entangled state formed by spontaneous dissociation.