Adiabatic tracking for photo- and magneto-association of Bose-Einstein condensates with Kerr nonlinearities

• Published in: The European physical journal. D, Atomic, molecular, and optical physics Vol. 70; no. 12; pp. 1 - 9
• Main Authors: Gevorgyan, Mariam, Guérin, Stéphane, Leroy, Claude, Ishkhanyan, Artur, Jauslin, Hans-Rudolf
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01-12-2016; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adiabatic flow; Applications of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos Theory; Atomic; Bifurcations; Bose-Einstein condensates; Molecular; Nonlinear dynamics; Optical and Plasma Physics; Physical Chemistry; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Quantum Information Technology; Quantum Physics; Regular Article; Spectroscopy/Spectrometry; Spintronics; Tracking; Cold Matter and Quantum Gas
• ISSN: 1434-6060; 1434-6079
• DOI: 10.1140/epjd/e2016-70396-9

We develop the method of adiabatic tracking for photo- and magneto-association of Bose-Einstein atomic condensates with models that include Kerr type nonlinearities. We show that the inclusion of these terms can produce qualitatively important modifications in the adiabatic dynamics, like the appearance of bifurcations, in which the trajectory that is being tracked loses its stability. As a consequence the adiabatic theorem does not apply and the adiabatic transfer can be strongly degraded. This degradation can be compensated by using fields that are strong enough compared with the values of the Kerr terms. The main result is that, despite these potentially detrimental features, there is always a choice of the detuning that leads to an efficient adiabatic tracking, even for relatively weak fields.
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