Optical excitation of nonlinear spin waves

Abstract

We demonstrate a technique for exciting spin waves in an ultracold gas of Rb-87 atoms based on tunable AC Stark potentials. This technique allows us to excite normal modes of spin waves with arbitrary amplitudes in the trapped gas, including dipole, quadrupole, octupole, and hexadecapole modes. These modes exhibit strong nonlinearities, which manifest as amplitude dependence of the excitation frequencies and departure from sinusoidal behavior. Our results are in good agreement with a full treatment of a quantum Boltzmann transport equation.

11 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Observation of Anomalous Spin Segregation in a Trapped Fermi Gas

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Engineering spin waves in a high-spin ultracold Fermi gas
• Dispersive probing of driven pseudo-spin dynamics in a gradient field
• Longitudinal spin diffusion in a nondegenerate trapped ${}^{87}$Rb gas
• Localized collapse and revival of coherence in an ultracold Bose gas
• Retardation effects in induced atomic dipole-dipole interactions
• Stable spin domains in a non-degenerate ultra-cold gas