A Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice

TLDR

The study demonstrates high‑level coherent control of a Bose‑Einstein condensate in a one‑dimensional optical lattice using its narrow momentum spread and atom‑optics techniques, and applies these methods to build a BEC accelerator and a large‑momentum‑transfer beamsplitter. The authors develop and employ band‑spectroscopy techniques, adiabatically turning on the lattice to load the condensate and using atom‑optics to coherently manipulate lattice states. Experiments show that the condensate can be loaded into the lattice ground state with very high efficiency, coherently transferred between lattice states, and used to construct a BEC accelerator and a novel large‑momentum‑transfer beamsplitter.

Abstract

We have performed a number of experiments with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in a one dimensional optical lattice. Making use of the small momentum spread of a BEC and standard atom optics techniques a high level of coherent control over an artificial solid state system is demonstrated. We are able to load the BEC into the lattice ground state with a very high efficiency by adiabatically turning on the optical lattice. We coherently transfer population between lattice states and observe their evolution. Methods are developed and used to perform band spectroscopy. We use these techniques to build a BEC accelerator and a novel, coherent, large-momentum-transfer beamsplitter.