Berlin 2005 – scientific programme

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SYUA: Mesoscopic Physics of Ultracold Atoms

SYUA 2: Optical Lattices

SYUA 2.2: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 9, 2005, 14:30–15:00, HU Audimax

Nonlinear matter waves in periodic potentials: From Adiabaticity to Zener — •Oliver Morsch — Dipartimento di Fisica, via Buonarroti 2, I-56127 Pisa, Italy

Since the early days of laser cooling, optical lattices have been a versatile toolbox for atomic physics. These periodic one-, two- or three-dimensional structures allow the creation of light-bound atomic crystals which can be easily tailored and manipulated. The advent of Bose-Einstein condensates in 1995 led naturally to the extension of optical lattice studies to the regime of nonlinear coherent matter waves. In this seminar, I shall briefly review the efforts made in that direction and then report on experiments done in our laboratory in Pisa. After some general observations on the dynamics of loading a condensate into an optical lattice, I shall present studies of nonlinear effects in Landau-Zener tunneling and of dynamical instabilities of a nonlinear matter wave inside a periodic potential.