Probing the light induced dipole-dipole interaction in momentum space

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the mechanical effect of the light-induced dipole-dipole interaction potential on the atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate. We present numerical calculations on the magnitude and shape of the induced potentials for different experimentally accessible geometries. It is shown that the mechanical effect can be distinguished from the effect of incoherent scattering for an experimentally feasible setting.