Axicon Lens for Coherent Matter Waves

Abstract

We have realized a conical matter wave lens. The repulsive potential of a focused laser beam was used to launch a Bose-Einstein condensate into a radially expanding wavepacket whose perfect ring shape was ensured by energy conservation. In spite of significant interactions between atoms, the spatial and velocity widths of the ring along its radial dimension remained extremely narrow, as also confirmed by numerical simulations. Our results open the possibility for cylindrical atom optics without the perturbing effect of mean-field interactions.

11 pages, 5 figures, Multimedia files (movies) available in our website: http://www.physics.gatech.edu/chandra/index.htm

References in corpus (6)

• Atom interferometry with trapped Fermi gases
• Beam quality of a non-ideal atom laser
• Achieving peak brightness in an atom laser
• An Optically Plugged Quadrupole Trap for Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Focusing a fountain of neutral cesium atoms with an electrostatic lens triplet
• Metastable Bose-Einstein Condensate in a Linear Potential

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Topological Winding and Unwinding in Metastable Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Metastable Quantum Phase Transitions in a Periodic One-dimensional Bose Gas: Mean-Field and Bogoliubov Analyses
• Effective Josephson dynamics in resonantly driven Bose-Einstein condensates
• Orbital Josephson effect and interactions in driven atom condensates on a ring
• Exact Yrast Spectra of Cold Atoms on a Ring
• Measuring the Complete Transverse Spatial Mode Spectrum of a Wave Field
• Exact quantum dynamics of yrast states in the finite 1D Bose gas