Quasi-continuous atom laser in the presence of gravity

We review experimental progress on atom lasers out-coupled from Bose-Einstein condensates, and consider the properties of such beams in the context of precision inertial sensing. The atom laser is the matter-wave analog of the optical laser. Both devices rely on Bose-enhanced scattering to produce a macroscopically populated trapped mode that is output-coupled to produce an intense beam. In both cases, the beams often display highly desirable properties such as low divergence...

A description of the dynamical response of uniformly trapped Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) to oscillating external gravitational fields is developed, with the inclusion of damping. Two different effects that can lead to the creation of phonons in the BEC are identified; direct driving and parametric driving. Additionally, the oscillating gravitational field couples phonon modes, which can lead to the transition of excitations between modes. The special case of the gravitat...

We demonstrate, through numerical simulations, the emission of a coherent continuous matter wave of constant amplitude from a Bose-Einstein Condensate in a shallow optical dipole trap. The process is achieved by spatial control of the variations of the scattering length along the trapping axis, including elastic three body interactions due to dipole interactions. In our approach, the outcoupling mechanism are atomic interactions and thus, the trap remains unaltered. We calcul...

We describe a controllable and precise laser tweezers for Bose-Einstein condensates of ultracold atomic gases. In our configuration, a laser beam is used to locally modify the sign of the scattering length in the vicinity of a trapped BEC. The induced attractive interactions between atoms allow to extract and transport a controllable number of atoms. We analyze, through numerical simulations, the number of emitted atoms as a function of the width and intensity of the outcoupl...

A model for the coherent output coupler of the Bose-Einstein condensed atoms from a trap in the recent MIT experiment (Phys. Rev. Lett., 78 (1997) 582) is established with a simple many-boson system of two states with linear coupling. Its exact solution for the many-body problem shows a factorization of dynamical evolution process, i.e., the wave function initially prepared in a direct product of a vacuum state and a coherent state remains in a direct product of two coherent ...

We investigate the feasible limits for realising a continuously evaporated atom laser with high-temperature sources. A plausible scheme for realising a truly continuous atom laser is to outcouple atoms from a partially condensed Bose gas, whilst continuously reloading the system with non-condensed thermal atoms and performing evaporative cooling. Here we use quantum kinetic theory to model this system and estimate feasible limits for the operation of such a scheme. For suffic...

We propose an experiment for the measurement of gravitational effect on cold atoms by applying a one-dimensional vertically sinusoidal oscillation to the magneto-optical trap; and observe the signature of low quantum energy shift of quantum bound states as a consequence of gravitational fluctuation. To this end, we present brief details of the experiment on a BEC, and a simplistic calculation of the Gross-Pitaevskii solution using Thomas-Fermi approximation with focus on the ...

We solve the Gross-Pitaevskii equation to model the behaviour of a weakly-interacting Bose condensate. Solutions are presented for the eigenstates in one- and two-dimensional harmonic traps. We include the effect of gravity and coupling to a second condensate to simulate an output coupler for Bose condensed atoms, and find that the output pulse shape is in qualitative agreement with experiment. We also model flow under gravity through a constriction, demonstrating excitation ...

A linear quantum dynamical theory for squeezing the output of the trapped Bose-Einstein condensate is presented with the Bogoliubov approximation. We observe that the non-classical properties, such as sub-Poisson distribution and quadrature squeezing effect, mutually oscillate between the quantum states of the applied optical field and the resulting atom laser beam with time. In particular, it is shown that an initially squeezed optical field will lead to squeezing in the out...

We show that particular configurations of intense off-resonant laser beams can give rise to an attractive 1/r interatomic potential between atoms located well within the laser wavelength. Such a ``gravitational-like'' interaction is shown to give stable Bose condensates that are self-bound (without an additional trap) with unique scaling properties and measurably distinct signatures.