Spatial effects in superradiant Rayleigh scattering from Bose-Einstein condensates

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive theoretical analysis of superradiant Rayleigh scattering in Bose-Einstein condensates, emphasizing spatially resolved dynamics and comparing propagation effects with other models.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed semiclassical Maxwell-Schroedinger framework that explains experimental observations and highlights the importance of propagation effects in the dynamics.

Findings

The theory explains atomic side-mode distributions.

Propagation effects significantly influence the scattering dynamics.

Comparison shows differences when propagation effects are neglected.

Abstract

We present a detailed theoretical analysis of superradiant Rayleigh scattering from atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. A thorough investigation of the spatially resolved time-evolution of optical and matter-wave fields is performed in the framework of the semiclassical Maxwell-Schroedinger equations. Our theory is not only able to explain many of the known experimental observations, e.g., the behavior of the atomic side-mode distributions, but also provides further detailed insights into the coupled dynamics of optical and matter-wave fields. To work out the significance of propagation effects, we compare our results to other theoretical models in which these effects are neglected.