Europhysics Letters (EPL)
Nonlinear control of chaotic walking of atoms in an optical lattice
Victor Yu. Argonov, Sergey V. Prants
Abstract
Near the resonance, centre-of-mass atomic motion in an optical lattice is shown to be a chaotic walking due to the interplay between coherent internal atomic dynamics and spontaneous emission. Statistical properties of chaotic atomic motion can be controlled by a single parameter, the detuning between the atomic transition frequency and the laser frequency. We derive a Fokker-Planck equation in the energetic space to describe the atomic transport near the resonance and demonstrate numerically how to manipulate the atomic motion varying the detuning.