14 research outputs found
Sensitivity to measurement perturbation of single atom dynamics in cavity QED
We consider continuous observation of the nonlinear dynamics of single atom
trapped in an optical cavity by a standing wave with intensity modulation. The
motion of the atom changes the phase of the field which is then monitored by
homodyne detection of the output field. We show that the conditional Hilbert
space dynamics of this system, subject to measurement induced perturbations,
depends strongly on whether the corresponding classical dynamics is regular or
chaotic. If the classical dynamics is chaotic the distribution of conditional
Hilbert space vectors corresponding to different observation records tends to
be orthogonal. This is a characteristic feature of hypersensitivity to
perturbation for quantum chaotic systems.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure
Experimental study of the quantum driven pendulum and its classical analogue in atoms optics
We present experimental results for the dynamics of cold atoms in a far detuned amplitude-modulated optical standing wave. Phase-space resonances constitute distinct peaks in the atomic momentum distribution containing up to 65% of all atoms resulting from a mixed quantum chaotic phase space. We characterize the atomic behavior in classical and quantum regimes and we present the applicable quantum and classical theory, which we have developed and refined. We show experimental proof that the size and the position of the resonances in phase space can be controlled by varying several parameters, such as the modulation frequency, the scaled well depth, the modulation amplitude, and the scaled Planck's constant of the system. We have found a surprising stability against amplitude noise. We present methods to accurately control the momentum of an ensemble of atoms using these phase-space resonances which could be used for efficient phase-space state preparation