Abstract

A continuous wave (cw) atom laser will most likely be realised by outcoupling from a reservoir containing a Bose-Einstein condensate at finite temperature. This will mean that the correlation properties and linewidth of the cw atom laser beam will be influenced by the thermal nature of the reservoir. Here we report on simulations using the stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii formalism for finite temperature dynamics to find the steady state properties of the outcoupled beam. We determine how the linewidth and correlation length depend on the condensate size, temperature, and outcoupling properties, and determine the optimum parameters for cw atom laser operation.

© 2007 Optical Society of America