Collapse and revival of the matter wave field of a Bose–Einstein condensate

By M. Greiner, O. Mandel, T. Hänsch, I. Bloch. Nature, 2002

837 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A Bose–Einstein condensate represents the most ‘classical’ form of a matter wave, just as an optical laser emits the most classical form of an electromagnetic wave. Nevertheless, the matter wave field has a quantized structure owing to the granularity of the discrete underlying atoms. Although such a field is usually assumed to be intrinsically stable (apart from incoherent loss processes), this is no longer true when the condensate is in a coherent superposition of different atom number states. For example, in a Bose–Einstein condensate confined by a three-dimensional optical lattice, each potential well can be prepared in a coherent superposition of different atom number states, with constant relative phases between neighbouring lattice sites. It is then natural to ask how the individual matter wave fields and their relative phases evolve. Here we use such a set-up to investigate these questions experimentally, observing that the matter wave field of the Bose–Einstein condensate undergoes a periodic series of collapses and revivals; this behaviour is directly demonstrated in the dynamical evolution of the multiple matter wave interference pattern. We attribute the oscillations to the quantized structure of the matter wave field and the collisions between individual atoms.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c6b30196d489abfcf0384d19c308d5914e285eb

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Citations in the corpus

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Engineered Open Systems and Quantum Simulations with Atoms and Ions (2012, background): “…ground state physics provides a seminal example for a quantum phase transition in the cold atom context (Fisher et al., 1989; Jaksch et al., 1998b; Greiner et al., 2002a; Bloch et al., 2008): For a given chemical potential µ, which in equilibrium fixes the mean particle density n, the critical…”
Conformal Field Theory for Inhomogeneous One-dimensional Quantum Systems: the Example of Non-Interacting Fermi Gases (2016, background): “In the past decade, breakthroughs in the field of optically trapped ultra-cold atomic gases [2] have lead to a new generation of quantum experiments that allow to directly observe fundamental phenomena such as quantum phase transitions [3] and coherent quantum dynamics [4, 5] in low-dimensional syst”
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