Paired atom laser beams created via four-wave mixing

Abstract

A method to create paired atom laser beams from a metastable helium atom laser via four-wave mixing is demonstrated. Radio frequency outcoupling is used to extract atoms from a Bose Einstein condensate near the center of the condensate and initiate scattering between trapped and untrapped atoms. The unequal strengths of the interactions for different internal states allows an energy-momentum resonance which leads to the creation of pairs of atoms scattered from the zero-velocity condensate. The resulting scattered beams are well separated from the main atom laser in the 2-dimensional transverse atom laser profile. Numerical simulations of the system are in good agreement with the observed atom laser spatial profiles, and indicate that the scattered beams are generated by a four-wave mixing process, suggesting that the beams are correlated.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Control of Interaction-Induced Dephasing of Bloch Oscillations
• Atom interferometry with a weakly-interacting Bose Einstein condensate
• Observation of atom pairs in spontaneous four wave mixing of two colliding Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Quantum turbulence and correlations in Bose-Einstein condensate collisions
• Homonuclear ionizing collisions of laser-cooled metastable helium atoms