Abstract

Hope, Savage and Moy have presented a model Hamiltonian for an atom mirror [1]. In conjuction with a Bose-Einstein condensate such a device can model the output coupler for an atom laser. The basic structure of the Hamiltonian is identical to the optical output coupler. A cavity mode at a particular wavevector is coupled to a set of output modes over a range of wavevectors. The difference is that the parameter in the Hamiltonian which would be the frequency in the optical case is the square of the wavevector for atoms. This has the consequence that the cavity mode is only coupled to one of the two superposition (sum and difference) modes of the output.

© 2000 IEEE