Theory of Four-Wave Mixing of Matter Waves from a Bose-Einstein Condensate

Published

August 1, 2000

Author(s)

M Trippenbach, Y B. Band, Paul S. Julienne

Abstract

A recent experiment [Deng et al., Nature 398, 218 (1999)] demonstrated the four-wave mixing of matter wavepackets created from a Bose-Einstein condensate. The experiment utilized light pulses to create two high-momentum wavepackets via Bragg diffraction from a stationary Bose-Einstein condensate. The high-momentum components and the initial low momentum condensate interact to form a new momentum component due to the nonlinear self-interaction of the bosonic atoms. We develop a three-dimensional quantum mechanical description, based on the slowly-varying-envelop approximation, for four-wave mixing in Bose-Einstein condensates using the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation and apply this description to describe the experimental observations and to make predictions. We examine the role of phase-modulation, momentum and energy conservation (i.e., phase-matching), and particle number conservation in four-wave mixing of matter waves, and develop simple models for understanding our numerical results.

Citation

Physical Review A (Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics)

Volume

62

Issue

No. 2

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

Bose-Einstein condensate, four-wave mixing, Gross-Pitaevskii equation, matter waves

Citation

Trippenbach, M. , Band, Y. and Julienne, P. (2000), Theory of Four-Wave Mixing of Matter Waves from a Bose-Einstein Condensate, Physical Review A (Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics) (Accessed October 15, 2025)