Observation and control of quantized scattering halos

Abstract

We investigate the production of s-wave scattering halos from collisions between the momentum components of a Bose-Einstein condensate released from an optical lattice. The lattice periodicity translates in a momentum comb responsible for the quantization of the halos' radii. We report on the engineering of those halos through the precise control of the atom dynamics in the lattice: we are able to specifically enhance collision processes with given center-of-mass and relative momenta. In particular, we observe quantized collision halos between opposite momenta components of increasing magnitude, up to 6 times the characteristic momentum scale of the lattice.