In situobservation of optomechanical Bloch oscillations in an optical cavity

Abstract

It is shown experimentally that a Bose-Einstein condensate inside an optical cavity, operating in the regime of strong cooperative coupling, responds to an external force by an optomechanical Bloch oscillation, which can be directly observed in the light leaking out of the cavity. Previous theoretical work predicts that the frequency of this oscillation matches with that of conventional Bloch oscillations such that its in situ monitoring may help to increase the data acquisition speed in precision force measurements.

Balancing long-range interactions and quantum pressure: Solitons in the Hamiltonian mean-field model

“…An analogous situation occurs in cavity-QED where atoms are trapped in an optical cavity pumped by a laser [123][124][125][126][127][128]. The laser light forms a standing (or travelling [129,130]) wave inside the cavity which the atoms experience as a sinusoidal potential via the optical dipole interaction.…”

Many-Body Quantum Dynamics of Initially Trapped Systems due to a Stark Potential: Thermalization versus Bloch Oscillations

“…Long after its prediction, Bloch oscillations were observed in semiconductor super-lattices [14,15], in cold atoms [16][17][18][19], and in periodic photonic structures [20][21][22]. In cold atom experiments, Bloch oscillations have by now been observed many times [2,[16][17][18][19][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], and are used widely as a measurement tool, e.g., for metrological applications [26,28,32,34] to detect Dirac points in optical lattices [33], etc. Some experiments have also explored the effect of inter-particle interactions on Bloch oscillations [23,25,[29][30][31]36].…”

Revealing short-range non-Newtonian gravity through Casimir–Polder shielding

“…Bloch oscillations occur when an external force is applied to a quantum particle that also experiences a periodic potential, which in the present case would be provided by an optical lattice formed by retro-reflection of a laser beam from the gold shield. Bloch oscillations are sensitive directly to the force, as opposed to collective dipole oscillations in a harmonic trap [29,30] (sensitive to force gradients), and so-called super-Bloch oscillations in driven optical lattices (sensitive directly to potential) [31], and can even be measured nondestructively [32][33][34]. The Bloch oscillation frequency ν B is directly proportional to the external force F…”