Nonlinear control of chaotic walking of atoms in an optical lattice

TL;DR

This paper investigates how atomic motion in an optical lattice exhibits chaos near resonance, and demonstrates control over this chaotic behavior through detuning, with implications for manipulating atomic transport.

Contribution

It introduces a new understanding of chaotic atomic walking in optical lattices and provides a method to control it via detuning, supported by a derived Fokker-Planck equation.

Findings

Chaotic atomic motion can be controlled by detuning.

A Fokker-Planck equation describes atomic transport.

Numerical demonstrations of motion manipulation.

Abstract

Centre-of-mass atomic motion in an optical lattice near the resonance is shown to be a chaotic walking due to the interplay between coherent internal atomic dynamics and spontaneous emission. Statistical properties of chaotic atomic motion can be controlled by the single parameter, the detuning between the atomic transition frequency and the laser frequency. We derive a Fokker-Planck equation in the energetic space to describe the atomic transport near the resonance and demonstrate numerically how to manipulate the atomic motion varying the detuning.