Self-organization in atomic vapours and opto-mechanical coupling

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• Thorsten Ackemann (Strathclyde)
• Friday 16 November 2012, 14:00-15:00
• Physics East 217.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Vincent Boyer.

The talk reviews experiments and their interpretation in (hot) sodium vapour with feedback from a single plane mirror. Hexagons, squares and more complex quasiperiodic and superlattice patterns emerge spontaneously in the plane transverse to the pump axis. The instability uses optical pumping nonlinearities and can be interpreted as being due to self-pumped four-wave mixing. For cold atoms there is the qualitatively new feature of opto-mechanical coupling and the possibility of the spontaneous emergence of density gratings. Design considerations for a corresponding experiment are discussed and it is shown that a purely opto-mechanical instability should be attainable for realistic parameters in a cavity filled with cold Rb atoms.

This talk is part of the Cold Atoms series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Bham Talks
• Cold Atoms
• Physics East 217
• What's on in Physics?

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