Hamburg 2009 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 46: Quanteneffekte: Lichtstreuung und Ausbreitung

Q 46.3: Talk

Thursday, March 5, 2009, 11:00–11:15, VMP 6 HS-E

Effective magnetic fields for stationary Dark-State Polaritons — •Johannes Otterbach¹, Razmik Unanyan¹, Julius Ruseckas², Gediminas Juzeliunas², and Michael Fleischhauer¹ — ¹Fachbereich Physik, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany — ²Inst. of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy of Vilnius University, 01108 Vilnius, Lithuania

Recently there is a growing interest in creating effective magnetic fields for neutral particles to study many-body phenomena in the absence of Coulomb interactions. Here we propose a mechanism to create effective magnetic fields for light-matter quasi particles, so-called dark-state polaritons (DSP). These particles arise in the coherent Raman interaction of a weak probe field with an ensemble of Λ-type atoms driven by a strong classical control field. Upon misaligning these beams an effective magnetic field is created. Albeit the achievable magnetic field per particle is not higher than in cold atom gases, DSP have a number of advantages. By using counter propagating control beams stationary DSPs are created. At large pulse lengths these particles behave as bosonic Schrödinger particles with a variable mass which can be controlled externally. Thus their effective temperature can easily be controlled and be made very small. Finally a confinement to lower dimensions is readily done by wave-guide or resonator techniques. These effective fields can be used to study a variety of single- and many-particle effects as e.g. Lorentz forces for neutral particles, anyonic statistics, vortex lattices and the bosonic analogue of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE).