Abstract

With the development of atomic cooling and trapping techniques, atom optics, which exploits the wavelike nature of atoms, has recently been extended to include many-atom effects for ultracold atoms.^1-5 In the ultracold regime, it is best to think of the atoms as a quantum field. The analogy between the matter fields of ultracold atoms and the electromagnetic fields of conventional optics has lead to an extension of atom optics research toward the study of nonlinear atom optics.^1,3-5

© 1995 IEEE