Collapse and revival of ultracold atoms in a microwave cavity and of photons in parametric down-conversion

Abstract

We present a new theoretical method to study a trapped gas of bosonic two-level atoms interacting with a single mode of a microwave cavity. This interaction is described by a trilinear Hamiltonian which is formally completely equivalent to the one describing parametric down-conversion in quantum optics. A system of differential equations describing the evolution, including the long-time behaviour, of not only the mean value but also the variance of the number of excited atoms is derived and solved analytically. For different initial states the mean number of excited atoms exhibits periodically reappearing dips, with an accompanying peak in the variance, or fractional collapses and revivals. Closed expressions for the period and the revival time are obtained.

5 pages, RevTeX, 3 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Ground-State Properties of Magnetically Trapped Bose-Condensed Rubidium Gas
• Continuous Observation of Interference Fringes from Bose Condensates
• Ground State and Excited States of a Confined Bose Gas

Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Properties of a coupled two species atom-heteronuclear molecule condensate
• Stability and entanglement in optical-atomic amplification of trapped atoms: the role of atomic collisions
• Matter-wave bistability in coupled atom-molecule quantum gases
• Trap environment effects over quantum statistics and atom-photon correlations in the collective atomic-recoil laser