Mainz 1997 – wissenschaftliches Programm

Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Downloads | Hilfe

Q: Quantenoptik

Q 20: Poster Ib: Atomoptik

Q 20.10: Poster

Dienstag, 4. März 1997, 16:00–18:00, Phil. Fak.

Atomic diffraction assisted by a stimulated Sisyphus mecanism — •Carsten Henkel¹, Klaus Mølmer², Robin Kaiser¹, and Chris I. Westbrook¹ — ¹Institut d’Optique, B. P. 147, F–91403 Orsay CEDEX — ²Institute for Physics and Astronomy, University of Aarhus, DK–8000 Århus C

We discuss a simple mecanism for the scattering of multilevel atoms from an atomic mirror formed by an evanescent laser wave. Provided the laser field contains a weak component with a polarization different from the field establishing the mirror, the atoms may change internal state in the vicinity of the classical turning point in the mirror. The resulting exchange between internal and kinetic energy of the atomic centre-of-mass motion leads to efficient large-angle scattering [1,2]. This mecanism is reminiscent of the so-called Sisyphus effect of laser cooling, and it may apply to atomic diffraction from a partially stationary evanescent wave with a polarization gradient and to the diffuse reflection at an evanescent wave above a rough dielectric surface [3]. For these two cases, we present and discuss perturbative calculations using the distorted wave Born approximation.

[1] R. Deutschmann et al., Phys. Rev. A48 (1993) R4023.

[2] D. Gordon and C. M. Savage, Opt. Comm. 130 (1996) 34.

[3] C. Henkel et al., Diffuse atomic reflection at a rough mirror, to be published in Phys. Rev. A (1997).