Manipulating optical information with coherent matter-wave dynamics

Speaker: Sean R. Garner, Harvard University

When: April 5, 2007 (Thu), 03:30PM to 05:00PM (add to my calendar)
Location: SCI 352

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

I will describe recent experiments [1] in which a laser pulse is ‘‘stored’‘ in one Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and later revived from another, spatially separate BEC. The information in the light pulse is transferred to the second BEC as a traveling matter wave. During its flight coherent evolution causes changes to the atomic wavefunction, which can be read out onto the outgoing light pulse. This constitutes a new type of quantum-coherent optical processing.

[1] Ginsberg, Garner, and Hau, Nature 445, 623 (2007).