The effect of light-matter interaction is investigated for a situation where counter propagating laser pulses of localized nature are incident on the atomic condensate. In contrast to the earlier investigations on the similar systems, it's assumed that the laser beams are ultra-fast and they have a
sech2 profile. Specifically, we consider a quasi-homogeneous, later extended to inhomogeneous, Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), which is exposed to two counter propagating orthogonally polarized ultra-fast laser beams of equal intensity. The electromagnetic field creates an optical potential for the Bose-Einstein condensate, which in turn modifies the optical field. Hence, light and matter are found to contentiously exchange energy and thus to modify themselves dynamically. In the inhomogenous case, a self-similar method is used here to treat a cigar-shaped BEC exposed to light. Our theoretical analysis in a hither to unexplored regime of BEC-light interaction hints at the solitonic bound state formation in the regime where the atom-atom interaction is repulsive and the light-matter interaction is attractive. The energy diagram also indicates a transfer of energy from photon to atom as the light-matter interaction turns repulsive from attractive.
The study of systems formed from ultracold atomic gases has emerged to become one of the most active research fields within the condensed matter landscape. These highly controllable macroscopic systems amalgamate ideas from many sub disciplines of physics, including the study of low temperatures, quantum optics and quantum information theory as well as the seemingly disparate field of high energy physics. The central concept of this thesis is gauge theories as applied to systems of bosonic atoms, which at temperatures close to absolute zero form Bose-Einstein condensates. To simulate the mathematical structure of a gauge theory, the geometric (Berry) phase formalism is adopted. This is in turn accomplished by considering the adiabatic following of the eigenstates of the light-matter coupling for an ensemble of atoms forming a Bose-Einstein condensate. These concepts are then applied to show how one can generate a spin-orbit coupling in a one-dimensional condensate, which additionally features a random mass term that allows us to study the physics of Anderson localization in an intriguing “quasi” relativistic regime. One of the features of light induced gauge potentials is that they are static; in the sense that there is no feedback between the light-matter interaction and the matter field. In the second part of this thesis it is demonstrated how such a feedback mechanism can be induced by the appropriate modification of the light-matter interaction. The consequences this has for the condensate are then described at the mean-field level, including the expected experimental signatures of the resulting ‘interacting’ gauge theory, in terms of the expansion of the condensate and also the structure of the solitons of this nonlinear system. Finally, this nonlinear model is applied to a double well system, from which the associated Bose-Hubbard model is derived and analysed; and the nonlinear Josephson problem studied.