Phase conjugation of trapped Bose-Einstein condensates

TL;DR

This paper explores matter-wave phase conjugation in multicomponent Bose-Einstein condensates, demonstrating an analogy with optical four-wave mixing to enable time-reversal of atomic beams and new diagnostic tools.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of matter-wave phase conjugation in Bose-Einstein condensates, establishing an analogy with optical multiwave mixing and proposing applications for coherence measurement.

Findings

Analogous behavior to optical four-wave mixing demonstrated

Potential for matter-wave phase conjugation in BECs established

New diagnostic methods for condensate coherence proposed

Abstract

We consider a multicomponent atomic Bose-Einstein condensate optically trapped in a far-off resonant dipole trap. Drawing an analogy with the optical situation, we show that this system can be regarded as an matter-wave analog of optical multiwave mixing. We concentrate specifically on condenstates in the hyperfine ground state F=1, in which case a simple analogy with optical four-wave mixing can be established. This opens up the way to realize matter-wave phase conjugation, whereby an atomic beam can be ``time-reversed.'' In addition to transfering population between a "central" mode and incident and retroreflecting beams, matter-wave phase conjugation also offers novel diagnostic tools to study the coherence properties of condensates, as well as to measure the relative scattering lengths of hyperfine sublevels.