Slow Polaritons in Atomic Bose-Einstein Condensates

Michael Fleischhauer, Johannes Otterbach, Razmik G. Unanyan

Y. Yamamoto, Hui Deng, H. Haug

Michael Fleischhauer, Johannes Otterbach, Razmik G. Unanyan

The generation of stationary distributions of light with three-dimensional confinement is discussed and a novel scheme for Bose-Einstein condensation of the associated quasi-particles, dark-state polaritons (DSP), is proposed. DSPs are created in the Raman interaction of laser fields with atoms and are the basis of ultra-slow, stopped, and stationary light. Stationary DSPs have a quadratic dispersion profile with very small and variable effective mass and have a long intrinsic lifetime. Due to the small mass the corresponding condensation temperature can be many orders of magnitude higher than that of atoms. After introducing stationary dark-state polaritons their incoherent generation and thermalization is discussed and conditions for condensation analyzed. Finally potential methods for an experimental observation of the condensation will be put forward.

Arturo Camacho-Guardian, K. Knakkergaard Nielsen, Thomas Pohl +1 more

This work describes the propagation of slow light through a Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of strong atomic interactions. It reveals the formation of polaron-polaritons as a result of the interplay between light-atom and atom-atom interactions.

Arturo Camacho-Guardian

The propagation of slow light encodes the universal features of a strongly interacting impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate. The author proposes the use of polariton physics as a nondestructive measurement tool for impurity physics and to investigate polaron physics in the single-impurity limit.