Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Quantized Rotation of Atoms From Photons With Orbital Angular Momentum

Published

Author(s)

Mikkel Andersen, Changhyun Ryu, Pierre Clade, Vasant Natarajan, A Vaziri, Kristian Helmerson, William D. Phillips

Abstract

Light can carry two kinds of angular momentum: Spin angular momentum (SAM) associated with its polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM) associated with its spatial mode [1, 2]. The coupling of optical SAM to atoms has been known for over a century [3] and been verified in numerous experiments. Light beams with OAM, however, have only recently been created [4, 5] and, in the past decade, the transfer of this angular momentum has been demonstrated by the rotation of macroscopic objects [6-8]. No experiments, however, have demonstrated the quantized transfer of the OAM of a photon to an atom. Here we directly demonstrate the coherent, quantized transfer of the OAM of photons to atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Using a 2-photon stimulated Raman process, similar to Bragg diffraction [9], but with Laguerre-Gaussian beams carrying OAM of ? per photon, we generate an atomic vortex state, corresponding to a cloud of atoms rotating with angular momentum per atom quantized in units of ?. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the process is coherent by creating superpositions of different vortex states where the relative phase between the states is determined by the relative phases of the optical fields. As every atom in a BEC is essentially identical, our results demonstrate that the OAM is transferred in quantized units of ?. Our process represents both a new and well-controlled way of creating a vortex state in a BEC and a new tool for the coherent control of the OAM of atomic samples, complementing existing tools for linear momentum and internal angular momentum.
Citation
Nature

Keywords

BEC, Laguerre-Gaussian, orbital angular momentum, photon-atom interaction, rotational states, superposition, vortex, vortices

Citation

Andersen, M. , Ryu, C. , Clade, P. , Natarajan, V. , Vaziri, A. , Helmerson, K. and Phillips, W. (2008), Quantized Rotation of Atoms From Photons With Orbital Angular Momentum, Nature (Accessed March 28, 2024)
Created October 16, 2008