Eur. Phys. J. D 1, 33-45 (1998)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s100530050061

Bright optical lattices in a longitudinal magnetic field. Experimental study of the oscillating and jumping regimes

Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Département de Physique de l'École Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France

Corresponding author: ^a robi@physique.ens.fr

Received: 9 October 1997
Accepted: 6 November 1997
Published online: 15 January 1998

Abstract

All the bright optical lattices studied so far have been designed to obtain a circularly polarized light at the bottom of the optical potential wells. This condition minimizes the departure rate of the atoms from the fundamental adiabatic surface and permits an oscillating regime in a large range of parameters. We present here an experimental study of cesium atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice, where the light is linearly polarized at the bottom of the potential wells. Temperature measurements and pump-probe spectroscopy give similar results for this lattice and for the conventional lin lin lattice (which have circular polarizations at the bottom of the wells) despite the fact that one lattice operates in the jumping regime and the other in the oscillating regime. We study the behaviour of the two types of lattices in a longitudinal magnetic field, with particular emphasis on the zero field and strong field regimes. The strong field situation is very simple because the eigenstates are then almost pure Zeeman substates and the adiabatic and diabatic potential surfaces are identical. The comparison between the zero-field and the high-field situations shows that the diabatic potentials are more appropriate to account for experimental observations in the novel lattice.