Observation of Caustics in the Trajectories of Cold Atoms in a Linear Magnetic Potential

Abstract

We have studied the spatial and temporal dynamics of a cold atom cloud in the conservative force field of a ferromagnetic guide, after laser cooling has been switched off suddenly. We observe outgoing 'waves' that correspond to caustics of individual trajectories of trapped atoms. This provides detailed information on the magnetic field, the energy distribution and the spin states.

arXiv comment21 pages, incl. 12 figures

References in corpus (7)

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• Suppression and enhancement of impurity scattering in a Bose-Einstein condensate
• The Phase Diagrams of F=2 Spinor Bose Condensates
• Topology of the ground state of two interacting Bose-Einstein condensates
• Novel Ferromagnetic Atom Waveguide with in situ loading
• Dynamics of spin-2 Bose condensate driven by external magnetic fields
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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Demonstration of fold and cusp catastrophes in an atomic cloud reflected from an optical barrier in the presence of gravity
• Caustics in quantum many-body dynamics
• Quantum caustics and the hierarchy of light cones in quenched spin chains
• Violent relaxation in quantum fluids with long-range interactions
• Macroscopic magnetic guide for cold atoms
• Catastrophes in non-equilibrium many-particle wave functions: universality and critical scaling
• Emergence of singularities from decoherence: Quantum catastrophes
• Gravitational Caustics in an Atom Laser
• Mapping a cloud of ultracold atoms onto a miniature storage ring
• Scattering of massless Dirac fermions in circular p-n junctions with and without magnetic field
• Caustics in the sine-Gordon model from quenches in coupled 1D Bose gases
• Emergence of caustics in dynamics of the Kitaev model