Interactions of atoms with a magneto-optical potential

Abstract

A theoretical study of the coherent interaction of multilevel atoms with a magneto-optical potential is presented. The potential is formed by counterpropagating linearly polarized laser beams whose polarization vectors intersect at an angle cphi and a static magnetic field applied parallel to the laser propagation direction. For a particular ratio of the light and magnetic field amplitudes, the light shift at positions of purely circularly polarized light is equal to the Zeeman splitting. In this case, for a three-level atom, one of the eigenvalues has a triangular spatial form. The diffraction of atoms from this triangular phase grating is an efficient beam splitter. The splitting is symmetric for cphi=90° and asymmetric for cphi<90°. In addition we show that at well-defined positions in the light field, the atom undergoes nonadiabatic transitions and thus by using state-selective detection, one could observe an interference pattern produced by an array of double slits.