Diode for Bose-Einstein condensates

Department of Physics, Stockholm University - 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden, EU

Received: 19 May 2011
Accepted: 11 October 2011

Abstract

Given a quantum state at some instant of time t, the underlying system Hamiltonian can not only predict how the state will evolve, but also the history of the state prior to t. Thereby, in order to have a directed motion, like in a diode, some sort of irreversibility must be considered. For the atom diode, this has been achieved by spontaneous decay of excited atomic levels. For an atomic condensate, it is clear, however, that such decay will cause both heating and decoherence of the condensate. To overcome this complication we introduce a different setup where the dissipation does not act directly on the atoms. The excited atoms are stimulatedly driven back to the ground state by exciting a cavity mode, which in return decays to the vacuum via photon losses. The efficiency of the method utilizing experimental parameters is shown to be almost perfect within large parameter regimes.