Matter-wave chaos with a cold atom in a standing-wave laser field

Abstract

Coherent motion of cold atoms in a standing-wave field is interpreted as a propagation in two optical potentials. It is shown that the wave-packet dynamics can be either regular or chaotic with transitions between these potentials after passing field nodes. Manifestations of de Broglie-wave chaos are found in the behavior of the momentum and position probabilities and the Wigner function. The probability of those transitions depends on the ratio of the squared detuning to the Doppler shift and is large in that range of the parameters where the classical motion is shown to be chaotic.

References in corpus (5)

• Coherent control of dressed matter waves
• Theory of chaotic atomic transport in an optical lattice
• Chaotic ratchet dynamics with cold atoms in a pair of pulsed optical lattices
• Observation of coherence revival and fidelity saturation in a delta-kicked rotor potential
• Theory of dissipative chaotic atomic transport in an optical lattice