Optical binding with cold atoms

Abstract

Optical binding is a form of light-mediated forces between elements of matter which emerge in response to the collective scattering of light. Such phenomenon has been studied mainly in the context of equilibrium stability of dielectric spheres arrays which move amid dissipative media. In this letter, we demonstrate that optically bounded states of a pair of cold atoms can exist, in the absence of non-radiative damping. We study the scaling laws for the unstable-stable phase transition at negative detuning and the unstable-metastable one for positive detuning. In addition, we show that angular momentum can lead to dynamical stabilisation with infinite range scaling.

7 pages and 7 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Superradiance in a Large and Dilute Cloud of Cold Atoms in the Linear-Optics Regime
• Collective atomic scattering and motional effects in a dense coherent medium
• Cooperativity in light scattering by cold atoms
• Optical resonance shifts in the fluorescence of thermal and cold atomic gases
• Observation of a Cooperative Radiation Force in the Presence of Disorder
• Photon bubbles in ultra-cold matter
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Observation of strong and tunable light-induced dipole-dipole interactions between optically levitated nanoparticles
• Quantum theory of non-Hermitian optical binding between nanoparticles
• Photon-mediated dipole-dipole interactions as a resource for quantum science and technology in cold atoms
• Enhanced dark-state sideband cooling in trapped atoms via photon-mediated dipole-dipole interactions
• Chiral-coupling-assisted refrigeration in trapped ions
• Self-induced cooling of optically bound pairs of atoms
• Towards a measurement of the Debye length in very large Magneto-Optical traps
• Cooperative Cooling in a 1D Chain of Optically Bound Cold Atoms