Photon recoil momentum in a Bose–Einstein condensate of a dilute gas

Abstract

We develop a "minimal" microscopic model to describe a two-pulse-Ramsay-interferometer-based scheme of measurement of the photon recoil momentum in a Bose-Einstein condensate of a dilute gas [Campbell et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 170403 (2005)]. We exploit the truncated coupled Maxwell-Schrödinger equations to elaborate the problem. Our approach provides a theoretical tool to reproduce essential features of the experimental results. Additionally, we enable to calculate the quantum-mechanical mean value of the recoil momentum and its statistical distribution that provides a detailed information about the recoil event.

Photon Recoil in Light Scattering by a Bose–Einstein Condensate of a Dilute Gas

“…In the recent article [12], we performed a computer simulation of the interference experiment [7], considering atoms as two-level systems and a BEC as an ideal gas. In the present work, we propose a description of the recoil effect for conditions that are more consistent with the experimental ones, that is, we consider a three-level model of the BEC atom and take into account the weak nonideality of the BEC in the Gross-Pitaevskii approximation [13][14][15][16].…”