English

How to STIRAP a vortex

Soft Condensed Matter 2007-05-23 v2

Abstract

We examine a scheme for the optical creation of a superfluid vortex in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), using the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) technique. By exposing an oblate, axis-symmetric condensate to two co-propagating laser pulses, one can transfer external angular momentum from the light field to the matter wave, if one of the beams is the fundamental Gaussian mode and the other is a Gauss-Laguerre mode of angular momentum 11\hbar. We demonstrate the complete transfer efficiency by numerical integration of the multi-component Gross-Pitaevskii equation and explain the results with an intuitive and accurate approximation within the Thomas-Fermi limit. In addition, we discuss residual excitations (breathing modes) which occur in the two-dimensional regime and present the Bogoliubov excitation spectrum.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0401298,
  title  = {How to STIRAP a vortex},
  author = {G. Nandi and R. Walser and W. P. Schleich},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0401298},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

8 pages, 10 eps-figures, slightly revised and resubmitted to PRA