English

Superradiant light scattering from a moving Bose-Einstein condensate

Soft Condensed Matter 2009-11-10 v2

Abstract

We investigate the interaction of a moving BEC with a far detuned laser beam. Superradiant Rayleigh scattering arises from the spontaneous formation of a matter-wave grating due to the interference of two wavepackets with different momenta. The system is described by the CARL-BEC model which is a generalization of the Gross-Pitaevskii model to include the self-consistent evolution of the scattered field. The experiment gives evidence of a damping of the matter-wave grating which depends on the initial velocity of the condensate. We describe this damping in terms of a phase-diffusion decoherence process, in good agreement with the experimental results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0306500,
  title  = {Superradiant light scattering from a moving Bose-Einstein condensate},
  author = {R. Bonifacio and F. S. Cataliotti and M. Cola and L. Fallani and C. Fort and N. Piovella and M. Inguscio},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0306500},
  year   = {2009}
}