Nonlinear optics
Can a lossy spot perfectly swallow interacting matter waves?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
A single lossy site in a lattice of ultracold atoms can completely absorb incoming matter waves from both sides, and the atoms' own interactions help lock the system into this state.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Other — Laboratory experiment on a Bose-Einstein condensate in a 1D optical lattice with one site made lossy by an electron beam, compared with a tight-binding Gross-Pitaevskii model and simulations.
- N
- No participant-style N; each lattice site holds roughly 700 atoms and simulations used about 200 sites.
- Population
- Atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice
- Outcome
- Atom number in the dissipative site over time, phase profile of currents, dissipation threshold for CPA
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Key findings
The model shows perfect absorption survives interactions, but only the slow incoming currents are stable; the fast ones are dynamically unstable. In experiments at moderate loss, the atom number in the lossy site stayed constant and equal to its neighbours, the signature of coherent perfect absorption. Above a critical loss the site emptied, but the breakdown happened near J/ħ, lower than the predicted 4J/ħ.
Methodology
The team loaded a Bose-Einstein condensate into a one-dimensional optical lattice and used an electron beam to remove atoms from one central site, making it an absorber. They solved a nonlinear lattice model to find when incoming waves from both sides would be perfectly absorbed, checked the stability of those states, and compared simulations with measured atom numbers for weak and strong dissipation.
Limitations
Strict perfect absorption requires an infinite lattice fed from infinity, so the experiment only shows a quasi-steady version in a finite system. The measured breakdown threshold disagrees with the simple model by about a factor of four, which the authors attribute to transverse instabilities and loading conditions not captured by the tight-binding picture. The matter-wave laser suggested by time reversal was not demonstrated.
How this study connects
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