Dressed dense atomic gases

Lesanovsky, Igor; Olmos, Beatriz; Guerin, William; Kaiser, Robin

Abstract

The interaction between atomic transition dipoles and photons leads to the formation of many-body states with collective dissipation and long-ranged interactions. Here, we put forward and explore a scenario in which a dense atomic gas — where the separation of the atoms is comparable to the transition wavelength — is weakly excited by an off-resonant laser field. We develop the theory for describing such dressed many-body ensemble and show that collective excitations are responsible for the emergence of many-body interactions, i.e. effective potentials that cannot be represented as a sum of binary terms. We illustrate how collective effects may be probed experimentally through microwave spectroscopy. We analyze time-dependent line-shifts, which are sensitive to the phase pattern of the dressing laser and show that the strong interactions lead to a dramatic slow down of the relaxation dynamics. Our study offers a new perspective on dense atomic ensembles interacting with light and promotes this platform as a setting for the exploration of dissipative non-equilibrium many-body physics.

Citation

Lesanovsky, I., Olmos, B., Guerin, W., & Kaiser, R. (2019). Dressed dense atomic gases. Physical Review A, 100(2), Article 021401(R). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.100.021401

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 2, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Aug 26, 2019
• Publication Date: Aug 26, 2019
• Deposit Date: Aug 4, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 8, 2019
• Journal: Physical Review A
• Print ISSN: 2469-9926
• Electronic ISSN: 2469-9934
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 100
• Issue: 2
• Article Number: 021401(R)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.100.021401
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2386356
• Publisher URL: https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.100.021401
• Contract Date: Aug 4, 2019