Related Experiment Videos
Observation of chaotic and regular dynamics in atom-optics billiards
N Friedman1, A Kaplan, D Carasso
1Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
Abstract:
We report on experimental observations of chaotic and regular motion of ultracold atoms confined by a billiard-shaped optical dipole potential induced by a rapidly scanning laser beam. To investigate the dynamics of the atoms confined by such an "atom-optics" billiard we measure the decay of the number of trapped atoms through a hole on the boundary. A fast and purely exponential decay, the clear signature of chaotic motion, is found for a stadium billiard, but not for a circular or an elliptical billiard, in agreement with theory. We also investigated the effects of decoherence, velocity spread, and gravity on regular and chaotic motion.