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Chinese Physics Letters

Deflection of an Atomic Beam in a Large Period Quantized Standing Light Wave

Xiaoguang Wang, Chang-Pu Sun

Published Dec 1, 1994• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

By using the Wei-Norman's method, the deflection of an atomic beam with a large period quantized standing light wave is analyzed for the case with two-level atom and single-mode cavity field. It is concluded that after passing through the standing light wave in cavity, the atomic beam is split into infinite beams symmetrically, and each momentum shift for a split component is proportional to the interaction time. It is also shown that the output momentum distribution of atoms is sensitive to the statistical properties of the cavity field.

DOI
10.1088/0256-307x/11/12/003

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By using the Wei-Norman's method, the deflection of an atomic beam with a large period quantized standing light wave is analyzed for the case with two-level atom and single-mode cavity field. It is concluded that after passing through the standing light wave in cavity, the atomic beam is split into infinite beams symmetrically, and each momentum shift for a split component is proportional to the interaction time. It is also shown that the output momentum distribution of atoms is sensitive to the statistical properties of the cavity field.
We investigate to which extent the quantum nature of light modifies laser-induced atomic beam deflection in a plane standing wave. Our model considers a single two-level atom interacting with a single quantized standing wave mode of the electromagnetic field. We neglect spontaneous emission into other field modes, an approximation valid for short enough times. We find that there is an essential qualitative difference between the cases of a coherent field and a thermal field. For a coherent field, the atomic momentum distribution after interaction has two symmetric peaks on the wings and resembles the semiclassical result of Arimondo et al. [Phys. Rev. A 24, 898 (1981)]. For a thermal field, this distribution has its maximum at p = 0. It is characterized by a constant contribution at p = 0, some sharp interference features, and near-Gaussian wings. The only feature common to both cases is that in the Raman-Nath regime of scattering, the range on transverse momenta grows linearly with time at a rate proportional to 〈 n 〉 , where 〈 n 〉 is the mean number of photons in the field.
We have observed momentum transfer from a standing-wave light field to an atomic beam. The atomic beam is split symmetrically into two peaks whose separation increases with field strength. The short interaction time ensures that this deflection is due to induced forces; these are described using a semiclassical dressed-atom treatment, which gives good agreement with the data. In addition to the splitting, we have observed diffraction of the atomic beam due to the exchange of even numbers of photons with the field.
We study the deflection of an atomic system with a resonant multilevel energy structure in classical and quantized wave light fields. We obtain that the shape of the momentum distribution is very sensitive to the energy level structure, whereas its moments are not. Comparison with a two-level case is made. PACS: 32.80, 33.80, 42.50 During the last two decades a remarkable development in mechanically manipulating atomary particles with resonant laser light has taken place (for a review, see for example [1, 2] and references therein). In addition to trapping and cooling of particles, the deflection of particles by a laser beam offers interesting possibilities, for example, to construct atomic interferometers or beam splitters [2-4]. This problem has been studied extensively both theoretically [2, 5, 8] and experimentally [9-12]. The fact that the momentum distribution caused by the scattering is connected to the quantum statistical properties of the scattered light has been known for some time [13]. Recently, one has also realized that the quantum statistics of the light causing the scattering can be important [14]. At low photon numbers, for example, the initial field state strongly influences the resulting momentum distribution. A related effect is that a standing wave and two counterpropagating traveling plane waves of equal emplitudes cause a different diffraction pattern when fields are treated quantum mechanically [15]. Most previous work on the deflection of particles by light fields used two-level atoms. In this paper we study how resonant multilevel systems scatter when they traverse a plane wave. In practical applications, molecules or highly excited atoms have similar energy structures as the models we use in this work. In most cases, we assume that the Raman-Nath regime is valid, i.e., the kinetic energy of the particle can be neglected. However, the field coupling is assumed to be sufficiently strong to make multiple scattering events possible. Our results show that the final momentum distribution of a multi-level system can strongly deviate from that of a two-level atom. It is of interest that the momentum distributions for resonant ladder systems are in general superpositions of few or several distributions similar to that of a two-level system. We also study the expectation values related to the momentum distribution and show that the spread in momentum is remarkably independent of the system considered. The absorption and reabsorption of photons during the scattering process causes the photon distribution to be smoothed out, and for long times a steady state is reached. The cases we studied did not show a creation of sub-Poissonian light. Our model and assumptions are described and discussed in Sect. 1. Some of the general properties of the momentum distribution are discussed in Sect. 2. In Sect. 3 we derive the generating function of the moments of momentum change in Raman-Nath regime. The main part of the paper is contained in Sects. 4 and 5, in which the momentum distribution itself is discussed for several model systems. In Sect. 4 a semiclassical field is assumed and in Sect. 5 a quantum field is used. The effects of the scattering on the field photon statistics are studied in Sect. 6. The final discussion of the results is given in Sect. 7.
We investigate deflections, spatial entanglement, and localization of an atomic beam due to its interaction with two modes of a standing electromagnetic field in an optical cavity. It is demonstrated that the deflection properties of an atom passing through two crossed standing light waves are crucially modified when photon-number correlated states of light are used instead of independent waves. Depending on the atom-light interaction scheme, various periodic two-dimensional patterns in a subwavelength regime are reported.
We analyze the interaction of an two-state atom with two dimensional cavity modes in the strong coupling regime, with the quantized atomic center of mass motion taken into account. By choosing proper initial condition for the atomic transverse momentum and the cavity detuning, we can control the atomic transverse momentum distribution in two dimensions. We have analyzed the two-dimensional momentum distribution of the excited atom fully quantum mechanically, which interacts with two independent pairs of counterpropagating traveling-wave modes, one pair of folded traveling-wave modes, two independent crossed standing-wave modes and one folded standing-wave mode, respectively.