853 research outputs found
Influence of a tight isotropic harmonic trap on photoassociation in ultracold homonuclear alkali gases
The influence of a tight isotropic harmonic trap on photoassociation of two
ultracold alkali atoms forming a homonuclear diatomic is investigated using
realistic atomic interaction potentials. Confinement of the initial atom pair
due to the trap leads to a uniform strong enhancement of the photoassociation
rate to most, but also to a strongly suppressed rate for some final states.
Thus tighter traps do not necessarily enhance the photoassociation rate. A
further massive enhancement of the rate is found for strong interatomic
interaction potentials. The details of this interaction play a minor role,
except for large repulsive interactions for which a sharp window occurs in the
photoassociation spectrum as is known from the trap-free case. A comparison
with simplified models describing the atomic interaction like the
pseudopotential approximation shows that they often provide reasonable
estimates for the trap-induced enhancement of the photoassociation rate even if
the predicted rates can be completely erroneous.Comment: 19 pages, 17 figure
Theoretical description of two ultracold atoms in finite 3D optical lattices using realistic interatomic interaction potentials
A theoretical approach is described for an exact numerical treatment of a
pair of ultracold atoms interacting via a central potential that are trapped in
a finite three-dimensional optical lattice. The coupling of center-of-mass and
relative-motion coordinates is treated using an exact diagonalization
(configuration-interaction) approach. The orthorhombic symmetry of an optical
lattice with three different but orthogonal lattice vectors is explicitly
considered as is the Fermionic or Bosonic symmetry in the case of
indistinguishable particles.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figure
Numerical Solution of the Time Dependent 3D Schrödinger Equation Describing Tunneling of Atoms from Anharmonic Traps
We present an efficient numerical method for the integration of the 3D Schrödinger equation. A tunneling problem of two interacting bosonic atoms confined in a 1D anharmonic trap has been successfully solved by means of this method. We demonstrate fast convergence of the final results with respect to spatial and temporal grid steps. The computational scheme is based on the operator-splitting technique with the implicit Crank-Nicolson algorithm on spatial sixth-order finite-differences. The computational time is proportional to the number of spatial grid points
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