2006/10/31 by W. Chen, D. Meiser, P. Meystre +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Frequency and Time Standards #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Condensed matter physics #Lattice (music) #Light field #Mott insulator #Optical lattice #Optics #Photon #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Superfluidity #cond-mat.other #physics.atom-ph #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.75.023812
10 pages revtex, 13 figures
arxiv created 2006/12/14 · openalex publication_date 2007/02/20 · arxiv updated 2015/06/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study the reflection of two counterpropagating modes of the light field in a ring resonator by ultracold atoms either in the Mott insulator state or in the superfluid state of an optical lattice. We obtain exact numerical results for a simple two-well model and carry out statistical calculations appropriate for the full lattice case. We find that the dynamics of the reflected light strongly depends on both the lattice spacing and the state of the matter-wave field. Depending on the lattice spacing, the light field is sensitive to various density-density correlation functions of the atoms. The light field and the atoms become strongly entangled if the latter are in a superfluid state, in which case the photon statistics typically exhibits complicated multimodal structures.