Nonlinear control of chaotic walking of atoms in an optical lattice

Abstract

Centre-of-mass atomic motion in an optical lattice near the resonance is shown to be a chaotic walking due to the interplay between coherent internal atomic dynamics and spontaneous emission. Statistical properties of chaotic atomic motion can be controlled by the single parameter, the detuning between the atomic transition frequency and the laser frequency. We derive a Fokker-Planck equation in the energetic space to describe the atomic transport near the resonance and demonstrate numerically how to manipulate the atomic motion varying the detuning.