Hamburg 2009 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 56: Poster IV

Q 56.32: Poster

Thursday, March 5, 2009, 16:30–19:00, VMP 9 Poster

Bose-Einstein Condensation of stationary light and relativistic dynamics: Klein tunneling and Zitterbewegung — •Razmik Unanyan, Johannes Otterbach, and Michael Fleischhauer — Fachbereich Physik, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, D-67663 Kaiserslautern

We analyze the behaviour of the Dark-state polaritons (DSP’s) in atomic ensemble with electromagnetically induced transparency with two counterpropagating control fields. Since DSPs are bosons, they can undergo a Bose-Einstein condensation at a critical temperature which can be many orders of magnitude larger than that of atoms. We show that thermalization of polaritons can occur via elastic collisions mediated by a resonantly enhanced optical Kerr nonlinearity on a time scale short compared to the decay time. The maximum allowed critical temperature, however, is limited due to the small mass of DSP’s. That is, the size of the DSP becomes comparable or smaller than the absorption length of the medium. We show that for such situations, the dynamics of the stationaty light pulses must be described by a two-component vector which obeys the one-dimensional two-component Dirac equation with an effective mass m^∗ and effective speed of light c^∗. As a consequence relativistic effects such as Klein tunneling and Zitterbewegung can be observed at rather low energy scales or respectively at rather large length scales.