Engineering long-range interactions between ultracold atoms with light
2021
Ultracold temperatures in dilute quantum gases opened the way to an exquisite
control of matter at the quantum level. Here we focus on the control of
ultracold atomic collisions using a laser to engineer their interactions at
large interatomic distances. We show that the entrance channel of two colliding
ultracold atoms can be coupled to a repulsive collisional channel by the laser
light so that the overall interaction between the two atoms becomes repulsive:
this prevents them to come close together and to undergo inelastic processes,
thus protecting the atomic gases from unwanted losses. We illustrate such an
optical shielding mechanism with potassium and cesium atoms colliding at
ultracold temperature (\textless 1 microkelvin). The process is described in
the framework of the dressed-state picture and we then solve the resulting
staionary coupled Schr\"{o}dinger equations. The role of spontaneous emission
and photoinduced inelastic scattering is also investigated as possible
limitations of the shielding efficiency. We predict an almost complete
suppression of inelastic collisions using a laser-induced coupling
characterized by a Rabi frequency of $\omega = 200$~MHz and a frequency detuned
from the potassium D2 transition by $\Delta = 200$~MHz. We found the
polarization of the laser has no influence on this efficiency. This proposal
could easily be formulated for other bi-alkali-metal pairs as their long-range
interaction are all very similar to each other.
Keywords:
- Correction
- Source
- Cite
- Save
- Machine Reading By IdeaReader
0
References
0
Citations
NaN
KQI