Attractive Optical Forces from Blackbody Radiation

Blackbody radiation around hot objects induces ac Stark shifts of the energy levels of nearby atoms and molecules. These shifts are roughly proportional to the fourth power of the temperature and induce a force decaying with the third power of the distance from the object. We explicitly calculate the resulting attractive blackbody optical dipole force for ground state hydrogen atoms. Surprisingly, this force can surpass the repulsive radiation pressure and actually pull the atoms against the radiation energy flow towards the surface with a force stronger than gravity. We exemplify the dominance of the "blackbody force" over gravity for hydrogen in a cloud of hot dust particles. This overlooked force appears relevant in various astrophysical scenarios, in particular, since analogous results hold for a wide class of other broadband radiation sources

Self-organised Limit-Cycles, Chaos and Phase-Slippage with a Superfluid inside an Optical Resonator

We study dynamical phases of a driven Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to the light field of a high-Q optical cavity. For high field seeking atoms at red detuning the system is known to show a transition from a spatially homogeneous steady-state to a self-organized regular lattice exhibiting super-radiant scattering into the cavity. For blue atom pump detuning the particles are repelled from the maxima of the light-induced optical potential suppressing scattering. We show that this generates a new dynamical instability of the self-ordered phase, leading to the appearance of self-ordered stable limit-cycles characterized by large amplitude self-sustained oscillations of both the condensate density and cavity field. The limit-cycles evolve into chaotic behavior by period doubling. Large amplitude oscillations of the condensate are accompanied by phase-slippage through soliton nucleation at a rate which increases by orders of magnitude in the chaotic regime. Different from a superfluid in a closed setup, this driven dissipative superfluid is not destroyed by the proliferation of solitons since kinetic energy is removed through cavity losses.Comment: 4 figure

Generalized mean-field approach to simulate large dissipative spin ensembles with long range interactions

We simulate the collective dynamics in spin lattices with long range interactions and collective decay in one, two and three dimensions. Starting from a dynamical mean-field approach derived by local factorization of the density operator we improve the numerical approximation of the full master equation by including pair correlations at any distance. This truncations enable us to drastically increase the number of spins in our numerical simulations from about ten spins in case of the full quantum model to several ten-thousands in the mean-field approximation and a few hundreds if pair correlations are included. Extensive numerical tests help us identify interaction strengths and geometric configurations where these approximations perform well and allow us to state fairly simple error estimates. By simulating systems of increasing size we show that in one and two dimensions we can include as many spins as needed to capture the properties of infinite size systems with high accuracy, while in 3D the method does not converge to desired accuracy within the system sizes we can currently implement. Our approach is well suited to give error estimates of magic wavelength optical lattices for atomic clock applications and corresponding super radiant lasers

Collective Enhancement and Suppression of Excitation Decay in Optical Lattices

We calculate radiative lifetimes of collective electronic excitations of atoms in an infinite one dimensional lattice. The translational symmetry along the lattice restricts the photon wave vector component parallel to the lattice to the exciton wave number and thus the possible emission directions. The resulting radiation damping rate and emission pattern of the exciton strongly deviates from independent atom. For some wave numbers and polarizations the excitons superradiantly decay very fast, while other excitons show zero radiation damping rate and form propagating meta-stable excitations. Such states could be directly coupled via tailored evanescent fields from a nearby fiber.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figure