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Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics

Proliferation of atomic wave packets at the nodes of a standing light wave

Sergey V. Prants

Published Nov 1, 2009• 21 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A quantum analysis is presented of the motion and internal state of a two-level atom in a strong standing-wave light field. Coherent evolution of the atomic wave-packet, atomic dipole moment, and population inversion strongly depends on the ratio between the detuning from atom-field resonance and a characteristic atomic frequency. In the basis of dressed states, atomic motion is represented as wave-packet motion in two effective optical potentials. At exact resonance, coherent population trapping is observed when an atom with zero momentum is centered at a standing-wave node. When the detuning is comparable to the characteristic atomic frequency, the atom crossing a node may or may not undergo a transition between the potentials with probabilities that are similar in order of magnitude. In this detuning range, atomic wave packets proliferate at the nodes of the standing wave. This phenomenon is interpreted as a quantum manifestation of chaotic transport of classical atoms observed in earlier studies. For a certain detuning range, there exists an interval of initial momentum values such that the atom simultaneously oscillates in an optical potential well and moves as a ballistic particle. This behavior of a wave packet is a quantum analog of a classical random walk of an atom, when it enters and leaves optical potential wells in a seemingly irregular manner and freely moves both ways in a periodic standing light wave. In a far-detuned field, the transition probability between the potentials is low, and adiabatic wave-packet evolution corresponding to regular classical motion of an atom is observed.

DOI
10.1134/s1063776109110041

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A quantum analysis is presented of the motion and internal state of a two-level atom in a strong standing-wave light field. Coherent evolution of the atomic wave-packet, atomic dipole moment, and population inversion strongly depends on the ratio between the detuning from atom-field resonance and a characteristic atomic frequency. In the basis of dressed states, atomic motion is represented as wave-packet motion in two effective optical potentials. At exact resonance, coherent population trapping is observed when an atom with zero momentum is centered at a standing-wave node. When the detuning is comparable to the characteristic atomic frequency, the atom crossing a node may or may not undergo a transition between the potentials with probabilities that are similar in order of magnitude. In this detuning range, atomic wave packets proliferate at the nodes of the standing wave. This phenomenon is interpreted as a quantum manifestation of chaotic transport of classical atoms observed in earlier studies. For a certain detuning range, there exists an interval of initial momentum values such that the atom simultaneously oscillates in an optical potential well and moves as a ballistic particle. This behavior of a wave packet is a quantum analog of a classical random walk of an atom, when it enters and leaves optical potential wells in a seemingly irregular manner and freely moves both ways in a periodic standing light wave. In a far-detuned field, the transition probability between the potentials is low, and adiabatic wave-packet evolution corresponding to regular classical motion of an atom is observed.
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.
Abstract This paper is a review article on some aspects of quantum–classical correspondence in chaotic dynamics of cold atoms interacting with a standing-wave laser field forming an optical lattice. The problem is treated from both (semi)classical and quantum points of view. In both approaches, the interaction of an atomic electic dipole with the laser field is treated quantum mechanically. Translational motion is described, at first, classically (atoms are considered to be point-like objects) and then quantum mechanically as a propagation of matter waves. Semiclassical equations of motion are shown to be chaotic in the sense of classical dynamical chaos. Point-like atoms in an absolutely deterministic and rigid optical lattice can move in a random-like manner demonstrating a chaotic walking with typical features of classical chaos. This behavior is explained by random-like ‘jumps’ of one of the atomic internal variable when atoms cross nodes of the standing wave and occurs in a specific range of the atom-field detuning. When treating atoms as matter waves, we show that they can make nonadiabatic transitions when crossing the standing-wave nodes. The point is that atomic wave packets split at each node in the same range of the atom-field detuning where the classical chaos occurs. The key point is that the squared amplitude of those semiclassical ‘jumps’ equal to the quantum Landau–Zener parameter which defines the probability of nonadiabatic transitions at the nodes. Nonadiabatic atomic wave packets are much more complicated compared to adiabatic ones and may be called chaotic in this sense. A few possible experiments to observe some manifestations of classical and quantum chaos with cold atoms in horizontal and vertical optical lattices are proposed and discussed.
We study dissipative transport of spontaneously emitting atoms in a one-dimensional (1D) standing-wave laser field in the regimes where the underlying deterministic Hamiltonian dynamics is regular and chaotic. A Monte Carlo stochastic wave-function method is applied to simulate semiclassically the atomic dynamics with coupled internal and translational degrees of freedom. It is shown in numerical experiments and confirmed analytically that chaotic atomic transport can take the form either of ballistic motion or a random walking with specific statistical properties. The character of spatial and momentum diffusion in the ballistic atomic transport is shown to change abruptly in the atom-laser detuning regime where the Hamiltonian dynamics is irregular in the sense of dynamical chaos. We find a clear correlation between the behavior of the momentum diffusion coefficient and Hamiltonian chaos probability which is a manifestation of chaoticity of the fundamental atom-light interaction in the diffusivelike dissipative atomic transport. We propose to measure a linear extent of atomic clouds in a 1D optical lattice and predict that, beginning with those values of the mean cloud's momentum for which the probability of Hamiltonian chaos is close to 1, the linear extent of the corresponding clouds should increase sharply. A sensitive dependence of statistical characteristics of dissipative transport on the values of the detuning allows us to manipulate the atomic transport by changing the laser frequency.
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 is modeled by semiclassical nonlinear Heisenberg equations of motion with two degrees of freedom. At exact resonance between the internal atomic transition and the cavity eigenfrequency, 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 extremal 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 ultracold 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, which is the effect of interest in studying the quantum-classical correspondence and quantum chaos in atomic optics.
We present an in-depth study on the behavior of an atomic wave packet which is placed in a standing wave cavity prepared in various states of light. We extract a simple classical oscillator model out of the dynamics of the quantum system. We quantitatively resolve the states of the spatially reorganized wave packet by the dressed state spatial probability distribution functions we developed. We also report a novel type of the “quantum collapse and revival” behavior of the Rabi nutation which is originated from the effect of the quantized atomic center-of-mass motion on the atomic internal motion.
The motion of a two-level atom with an internal degree of freedom that interacts with the field of a single-mode standing light wave in a high- Q cavity is treated as a scattering problem. At detunings between atomic and field resonances δ, atomic recoil frequencies α, initial atomic momenta ρ 0 , and numbers of excitations N at which the semiclassical equations have chaotic solutions (in the sense of their exponential sensitivity to small changes in the initial conditions), atomic scattering is fractal with strongly pronounced self-similarity of the dependence of time T at which the atom leaves the cavity at its initial momentum; the fractal dimension of this curve is 1.84. In the chaotic regime, there are two infinite sets of atomic initial momenta for which T =∞ (in the idealized case of the absence of any loss). They correspond to separatrix-like trajectories along which the atom asymptotically approaches certain configuration space points and to the trajectories of infinitely long chaotic wandering of atoms in the cavity. These trajectories make up countable and uncountable fractals, respectively. Correlations between Rabi atomic oscillations and atomic motion can lead to Doppler-Rabi resonances, that is, deep oscillations of the internal energy of the atom, for large detunings δ that satisfy the condition |αρ 0 |≈|δ|.