Fractal stabilization of Wannier-Stark resonances

Abstract

The quasienergy spectrum of a Bloch electron affected by dc-ac fields is known to be a fractal function of the so-called electric matching ratio which is the ratio of the ac field frequency and the Bloch frequency. This paper studies a manifestation of the fractal spectrum in the system atom in a standing laser wave, which is a quantum optical realization of a Bloch electron. It is shown that for an appropriate choice of the system parameters the atomic survival probability (a quantity measured in laboratory experiments) develops a fractal structure as a function of the electric matching ratio. Numerical simulations under classically chaotic scattering conditions show good agreement with theoretical predictions based on random matrix theory.

6 pages, 3 Postscript figures, Europhysics Letter (in press)