We have used optical forces to guide atoms through hollow-core optical fibers. Laser light is launched into the hollow region of a glass capillary fiber and guided by grazing-incidence reflection from the walls. When the laser is detuned 1 -30 GHz red of the Rb D2 resonance lines, dipole forces attract atoms to the high-intensity region along the axis and guide them through the fiber. We show that atoms may be guided around bends in the fiber and that in initial experiments the atoms experience up to 18 reflections from the potential walls with minimal loss. PACS numbers: 32.80.Lg, 32.80.Pj, 39.10.+j An atom placed in an optical beam is attracted to or repelled from regions of high intensity, depending on the polarizability of the atom at the optical frequency. This ponderomotive force is the basis of several atom-trapping techniques [1] and is also the basis of Cook and Hill's original proposal [2] for an atom mirror using evanescent optical fields. Out of the light-invoked atom mirror notion grew the concept of atom waveguides. The idea, first proposed by Ol'Shanii, Ovchinnikov, and Letokhov [3],
We demonstrate the collapse of a continuum of transverse modes in a self-imaging ring resonator that is photorefractively pumped. The resulting localized mode has an arbitrary transverse location. The mode collapse results from placing saturable photorefractive gain and loss media in spatially conjugate resonator planes. The transverse position of the localized mode is unstable under small cavity misalignments, and it drifts across the transverse aperture while retaining its spatial form.
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