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Physical Review Letters

Experimental Observation of Rabi Oscillations in Photonic Lattices

K. V. Shandarova, Christian E. Rüter, Detlef Kip, Konstantinos G. Makris, Demetrios N. Christodoulides, Or Peleg, Mordechai Segev

Published Mar 27, 2009• 108 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate spatial Rabi oscillations in optical waveguide arrays. Adiabatic transitions between extended Floquet-Bloch modes associated with different bands are stimulated by periodic modulation of the photonic lattice in the propagation direction. When the stimulating modulation also carries transverse momentum, the transition becomes indirect, equivalent to phonon-assisted Rabi oscillations. In solid state physics such indirect Rabi oscillations necessitate coherent phonons and hence they have never been observed. Our experiments suggest that phonon-assisted Rabi oscillations are observable also with Bose-Einstein condensates, as well as with other wave systems-where coherence can be maintained for at least one period of the Rabi oscillation.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.102.123905

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We demonstrate spatial Rabi oscillations in optical waveguide arrays. Adiabatic transitions between extended Floquet-Bloch modes associated with different bands are stimulated by periodic modulation of the photonic lattice in the propagation direction. When the stimulating modulation also carries transverse momentum, the transition becomes indirect, equivalent to phonon-assisted Rabi oscillations. In solid state physics such indirect Rabi oscillations necessitate coherent phonons and hence they have never been observed. Our experiments suggest that phonon-assisted Rabi oscillations are observable also with Bose-Einstein condensates, as well as with other wave systems-where coherence can be maintained for at least one period of the Rabi oscillation.
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Classical wave optical analogs of coherent population transfer via a continuum, recently demonstrated for laser-driven atoms and molecules in the atomic physics context, are theoretically proposed for light waves propagating in waveguide-based photonic structures. In particular, it is shown that exploitation of the optical analogs of two-photon Rabi oscillations and stimulated Raman adiabatic passage via continuous states enables efficient transfer of light waves between two channel optical waveguides side coupled to a slab waveguide.
Quantum gases in optical lattices allow for fundamental studies in atomic and condensed-matter physics and the exploration of novel effects. After a brief introduction to the fundamentals of quantum gas experiments in optical lattices, we discuss two recent experiments focusing on driven matter waves in a one-dimensional optical lattice. The first experiment uses a tilted bichromatic optical lattice to investigate the interplay of disorder and collisional interactions in the accelerated transport of a Bose-Einstein condensate. Here, a screening effect is observed, in which the interactions effectively cancel the damping of Bloch oscillations induced by a (quasi-)disordered potential. This effect can be understood through a modification of the underlying band structure by the interactions. The second experiment studies the dynamics of a weakly trapped condensate resonantly coupled to the orbitals of a strongly confining state-selective lattice. We observe momentum distributions that correspond to matter wave diffraction from a periodic structure; however, the diffractive dynamics remain strongly linked to the internal-state Rabi oscillations. In the regime investigated, which we call the nonadiabatic regime, no diffracting potential can be defined. We show how only for much stronger coupling, the internal and external dynamics decouple, transitioning from nonadiabatic diffraction to the well-studied Kapitza-Dirac diffraction. We further investigate prospects for realizing dissipative spin models in our ultracold atomic gas experiment. To this end, we develop and test in the laboratory several possible implementations of effective spins with differential coupling to a superfluid background and examine their viability for a realization of the spin-boson model. | 94 pages
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