A semiclassical study is carried out of the nonlinear interaction dynamics between two-level atoms and a standing-wave field in a high-finesse cavity. As a result of atomic movement or wave amplitude modulation, a dynamic local instability occurs in a strongly coupled atom-field system. The appearance of dynamical Hamiltonian chaos, fractals, and Lévy flights is demonstrated for the models of two experimental devices: a (micro)maser with thermal Rydberg atoms and a microlaser with cold atoms. Numerical simulation showed that the manifestations of classical chaos, atomic fractals, and flights can be observed in the appropriate real experiments. Attention is drawn to the prospects provided by work on the atom-field systems in the coupling-modulated high-finesse cavities for further investigation of the quantum-classical correspondence, quantum chaos, and decoherence.
We study dynamics of the atom-photon interaction in cavity quantum electrodynamics, considering a cold two-level atom in a single-mode high-finesse standing-wave cavity as a nonlinear Hamiltonian system with three coupled degrees of freedom: translational, internal atomic, and the field. The system proves to have different types of motion including Lévy flights and chaotic walkings of an atom in a cavity. The corresponding equations of motion for expectation values of the atom and field variables have two characteristic time scales: fast Rabi oscillations of the internal atomic and field quantities and slow translational oscillations of the center of the atom mass. It is shown that the translational motion, related to the atom recoils, is governed by an equation of a parametric nonlinear pendulum with a frequency modulated by the Rabi oscillations. This type of dynamics is chaotic with some width of the stochastic layer that is estimated analytically. The width is fairly small for realistic values of the control parameters, the normalized detuning delta and atomic recoil frequency alpha. We consider the Poincaré sections of the dynamics, compute the Lyapunov exponents, and find a range of the detuning, |delta| less, similar 3, where chaos is prominent. It is demonstrated how the atom-photon dynamics with a given value of alpha depends on the values of delta and initial conditions. Two types of Lévy flights, one corresponding to the ballistic motion of the atom and the other corresponding to small oscillations in a potential well, are found. These flights influence statistical properties of the atom-photon interaction such as distribution of Poincaré recurrences and moments of the atom position x. The simulation shows different regimes of motion, from slightly abnormal diffusion with <x(2)> approximately tau(1.13) at delta=1.2 to a superdiffusion with <x(2)> approximately tau(2.2) at delta=1.92 that corresponds to a superballistic motion of the atom with an acceleration. The obtained results can be used to find new ways to manipulate atoms, to cool and trap them by adjusting the detuning delta.
Strong coupling of the internal and external degrees of freedom of a cold atom to each other and to the spatially periodic field of the standing light wave in a high-finesse cavity is responsible for the dynamic instability of the atomic center-of-mass motion. Due to a weak interaction of the internal nonlinear resonances in the standard model of cavity QED, a stochastic layer appears, whose width in the semiclassical approximation is estimated in terms of the main parameters of the system: atomic recoil frequency, mean number of excitations, and detuning from the resonance. As a result, the atomic motion in the absolutely regular potential has the fractal character, with long Lévy flights alternating with small chaotic oscillations in potential wells.
Nonlinear dynamics of the fundamental interaction between a two-level atom with recoil and a quantized radiation field in a high-quality cavity is studied. We consider the strongly coupled atom-field system as a quantum-classical hybrid with dynamically coupled quantum and classical degrees of freedom. We show that, even in the absence of any other interaction with environment, the interaction of the purely quantum atom-field system with the external atomic degree of freedom provides the emergence of classical dynamical chaos from quantum electrodynamics. Atomic fractals with self-similar intermittency of smooth and unresolved structures are found in the exit-time scattering function. Tiny interplay between all the degrees of freedom is responsible for dynamical trapping of atoms even in a very short microcavity. Gedanken experiments are proposed to detect manifestations of atomic fractals in cavity quantum electrodynamics.
We study the coupled translational, electronic, and field dynamics of the combined system "a two-level atom + a single-mode quantized field + a standing-wave ideal cavity". We derive Hamilton -- Schr\\"odinger equations for probability amplitudes and averaged position and momentum of a point-like atom interacting with the quantized field in a standing-wave cavity. They constitute, in general, an infinite-dimensional set of equations with an infinite number of integrals of motion which may be reduced to a dynamical system with four degrees of freedom if the quantized field is supposed to be initially prepared in a Fock state. This system is found to produce semiquantum chaos with positive values of the maximal Lyapunov exponent. At large values of detuning
∣delta∣gg1, the Rabi atomic oscillations are usually shallow, and the dynamics is found to be almost regular. The Doppler -- Rabi resonance, deep Rabi oscillations that may occur at any large value of
∣delta∣ to be equal to
∣alphap0∣, is found numerically and described analytically (with
alpha to be the normalized recoil frequency and
p0 the initial atomic momentum). Two gedanken experiments are proposed to detect manifestations of semiquantum chaos in real experiments. In the chaotic regime values of the population inversion
zout, measured with atoms after transversing a cavity, are so sensitive to small changes in the initial inversion
zin that the probability of detecting any value of
zout in the admissible interval becomes almost unity in a short time. Chaotic wandering of a two-level atom in a quantized Fock field is shown to be fractal. Fractal-like structures, typical for chaotic scattering, are numerically found in the dependence of the time of exit of atoms from the cavity on their initial momenta.
We study the coupled translational and internal dynamics of a two-level atom in a spatially periodic optical potential created by a single-mode field in a high-finesse Fabry-Perot cavity. The strongly-coupled atom-cavity system with atomic center-of-mass motion included in modeled by semiclassical nonlinear Heisenberg equations of motion with two degrees of freedom. At exact resonance between the internal atomic transition and the cavity eigen frequency, the internal and translational degrees of freedom are separated from each other resulting in periodically modulated Rabi oscillations and regular translational motion. Near the atom-field resonance, the coupled dynamics is found to be irregular and even chaotic in the sense of external sensitivity to initial conditions. It is manifested as a chaotic motion of an atom in an absolutely regular spatially periodic potential in the absence of any random fluctuations. This effect may be explained as a result of the interaction of nonlinear resonances in the atom-field nonlinear pendulum whose low- frequency translational motion is modulated by the high- frequency Rabi oscillations. The irregular motion is studied in detail in numerical experiments using the arsenal of methods of the dynamical systems theory. The results obtained are compared with recent experiments with ultra cold single atoms interacting with single photons in the strong-coupling regime. We estimate the ranges of the system's control parameters, the detuning, the recoil frequency, and the mean number of intracavity photons, in which the interaction of nonlinear resonances may lead, under realistic conditions, to local instability of the center-of-mass motion and some manifestations of dynamical chaos, the effect which is of interest in studying the quantum-classical correspondence and quantum chaos in atomic optics.
Nonlinear dynamics in the fundamental interaction between a two-level atom with recoil and a quantized radiation field in a high-quality microcavity is studied. We consider the strongly coupled atom-field system as a quantum-classical hybrid with dynamically coupled quantum and classical egrees of freedom. We show that, even in the absence of any other interaction with environment, the coupling of quantum and classical degrees of freedom provides the emergence of classical dynamical chaos from quantum electrodynamics. It manifest itself in the atomic external degree of freedom as a random walking of an atom inside a cavity with a prominent fractal-like behavior and in the quantum atom-filed degrees of freedom as a sensitive dependence of atomic inversion on small variations in initial conditions. It is shown that dependences of variance of quantum entanglement and of the maximum Lyapunov exponent on the detuning of the atom-field resonance correlate strongly. This result provides a quantum-classical correspondence in a closed physical system.