Abstract:
Strong coupling of the internal and external degrees of freedom of a cold atom to each other and to the spatially periodic field of the standing light wave in a high-finesse cavity is responsible for the dynamic instability of the atomic center-of-mass motion. Due to a weak interaction of the internal nonlinear resonances in the standard model of cavity QED, a stochastic layer appears, whose width in the semiclassical approximation is estimated in terms of the main parameters of the system: atomic recoil frequency, mean number of excitations, and detuning from the resonance. As a result, the atomic motion in the absolutely regular potential has the fractal character, with long Lévy flights alternating with small chaotic oscillations in potential wells.
Citation:
S. V. Prants, “Interaction of nonlinear resonances in cavity QED”, Pis'ma v Zh. Èksper. Teoret. Fiz., 75:2 (2002), 71–73; JETP Letters, 75:2 (2002), 63–65