Effect of light-assisted tunable interaction on the position response function of cold atoms

Abstract

The position response of a particle subjected to a perturbation is of general interest in physics. We study the modification of the position response function of an ensemble of cold atoms in a magneto-optical trap in the presence of tunable light-assisted interactions. We subject the cold atoms to an intense laser light tuned near the photoassociation resonance and observe the position response of the atoms subjected to a sudden displacement. Surprisingly, we observe that the entire cold atomic cloud undergoes collective oscillations. We use a generalised quantum Langevin approach to theoretically analyse the results of the experiments and find good agreement.

20 pages, 7 Figures

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• Observation of dipole-dipole interaction in a degenerate quantum gas
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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Non-resonant inter-species interaction and its effect on the position response function of cold atoms