English

Nonequilibrium steady state in a large magneto-optical trap

Atomic Physics 2022-12-20 v1 Quantum Gases

Abstract

Considering light-mediated long-range interactions between cold atoms in a magneto-optical trap (MOT), we present numerical evidence of a nonequilibrium steady state (NESS) for sufficiently large number of atoms (> 10^8). This state manifests itself as the appearance of an anisotropic distribution of velocity when a MOT approaches the threshold beyond which self-oscillating instabilities occur. Our three-dimensional (3D) spatiotemporal model with nonlocal spatial dependencies stemming from the interatomic interactions has recently been compared successfully to predict different instability thresholds and regimes in experiments with rubidium atoms. The behavior of the NESS is studied as a function of the main MOT parameters, including its spatiotemporal characteristics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.08705,
  title  = {Nonequilibrium steady state in a large magneto-optical trap},
  author = {Marius Gaudesius and Yong-Chang Zhang and Thomas Pohl and Guillaume Labeyrie and Robin Kaiser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.08705},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

10 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:39:35.956Z