Hannover 2016 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 11: Poster: Quantum Optics and Photonics I
Q 11.37: Poster
Monday, February 29, 2016, 16:30–19:00, Empore Lichthof
Tunable polarons of slow-light polaritons in a BEC — •Fabian Grusdt1,2,3 and Michael Fleischhauer1 — 1Department of Physics and Research Center OPTIMAS, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany — 2Graduate School Materials Science in Mainz, Kaiserslautern, Germany — 3Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
When a mobile impurity atom interacts with a bath of phonons, for example inside a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), it forms a polaron. Here we present a versatile experimental setup that allows to tune both the mass of the impurity and its interactions with the BEC. The impurity is realized as a dark-state polariton, the long-lived quasiparticle of slow light, inside a quasi two-dimensional BEC. We show that its interactions with the Bogoliubov phonons lead to photonic polarons, described by the Bogoliubov-Fröhlich Hamiltonian for sufficiently weak couplings, and make theoretical predictions using an extension of a recently introduced renormalization group approach. Physics beyond the Fröhlich model can also be probed using our scheme. Due to the small impurity mass, the photonic setup is ideally suited to investigate the polaron self-trapping transition in a BEC, which is poorly understood at present.