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Optical binding with cold atoms

Atomic Physics 2019-09-30 v2 Optics

Abstract

Optical binding is a form of light-mediated forces between elements of matter which emerge in response to the collective scattering of light. Such phenomenon has been studied mainly in the context of equilibrium stability of dielectric spheres arrays which move amid dissipative media. In this letter, we demonstrate that optically bounded states of a pair of cold atoms can exist, in the absence of non-radiative damping. We study the scaling laws for the unstable-stable phase transition at negative detuning and the unstable-metastable one for positive detuning. In addition, we show that angular momentum can lead to dynamical stabilisation with infinite range scaling.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.06173,
  title  = {Optical binding with cold atoms},
  author = {Carlos E. Máximo and Romain Bachelard and Robin Kaiser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.06173},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

7 pages and 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:48:25.032Z