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Physical Review A

Superradiant exchange of orbital angular momentum between light and cold atoms

Gordon R. M. Robb

Published Feb 28, 2012• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An analysis of superradiant scattering of light by ultracold atoms is presented in which the pump and scattered light consist of hollow counterrotating Laguerre-Gaussian beams possessing orbital angular momentum. It is shown that the interaction between the Laguerre-Gaussian beams and the atoms can give rise to a superradiant instability in which orbital angular momentum is transferred to the atoms and the probe field is amplified. In the case where the atoms constitute a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) that is trapped in a one-dimensional ring geometry, the transfer of orbital angular momentum to the BEC during the instability means that the BEC spontaneously develops rotation in the ring.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.85.023426

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An analysis of superradiant scattering of light by ultracold atoms is presented in which the pump and scattered light consist of hollow counterrotating Laguerre-Gaussian beams possessing orbital angular momentum. It is shown that the interaction between the Laguerre-Gaussian beams and the atoms can give rise to a superradiant instability in which orbital angular momentum is transferred to the atoms and the probe field is amplified. In the case where the atoms constitute a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) that is trapped in a one-dimensional ring geometry, the transfer of orbital angular momentum to the BEC during the instability means that the BEC spontaneously develops rotation in the ring.
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The creation of a topological vortex by a superradiant scattering of a Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beam off an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is theoretically investigated. It is shown that scattered superradiant radiation can be either in a Gaussian mode without angular momentum or in a LG mode with angular momentum. The conditions leading to these two qualitatively distinct regimes of superradiance are determined in terms of the width for the pump laser and the condensate size for the limiting cases where the recoil energy is both much smaller and larger than the atomic interaction energy.
The exchange of orbital angular momentum (OAM) between paraxial optical vortex and a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of atomic gases is well known. In this paper, we develop a theory for the microscopic interaction between matter and an optical vortex beyond paraxial approximation. We show how superposition of vortex states of BEC can be created with a focused optical vortex. Since the polarization or spin angular momentum (SAM) of the optical field is coupled with OAM of the field, in this case, these angular momenta can be transferred to the internal electronic and external center-of-mass motion of atoms provided both the motions are coupled. We propose a scheme for producing the superposition of matter-wave vortices using Gaussian and a focused Laguerre-Gaussian beam. We study how two-photon Rabi frequencies of stimulated Raman transitions vary with focusing angles for different combinations of OAM and SAM of optical states. We demonstrate the formation of vortex-antivortex structure and discuss interference of three vortex states in a BEC.
We analyze the collective light scattering by cold atoms in free space of a pump-laser beam possessing orbital angular momentum. We derive a set of coupled multiparticle equations for the atomic motion in which the vacuum-mode field is adiabatically eliminated. The resulting equations describe collective recoil as due to either transfer of linear momentum or orbital angular momentum. For a transverse annular atomic distribution the initial equilibrium with uniform atomic phases and no scattered field is unstable. The atoms are set in rotation and bunched in phase at different harmonics depending on the pump azimuthal index $\ensuremath{\ell}$ and on the ring radius.