Investigations of a two-mode atom laser model

Abstract

Atom lasers based on rf-outcoupling from a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate can be described by a set of generalized, coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations (GPE). If not only one but two radio frequencies are used for outcoupling, the atoms emerging from the trap have two different energies and the total wavefunction of the untrapped spin-state is a coherent superposition which leads to a pulsed atomic beam. We present results for such a situation obtained from a 1D-GPE model for magnetically trapped Rb-87 in the F=1 state. The wavefunction of the atomic beam can be approximated by a sum of two Airy functions. In the limit of weak coupling we calculate the intensity analytically.