Eur. Phys. J. D (2016) 70: 253
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2016-70396-9

Regular Article

Adiabatic tracking for photo- and magneto-association of Bose-Einstein condensates with Kerr nonlinearities

¹ Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Carnot de Bourgogne, CNRS UMR 6303, Université de Bourgogne Franche Comté, BP 47870, 21078 Dijon, France
² Institute for Physical Research NAS of Armenia, 0203 Ashtarak-2, Armenia
³ Armenian State Pedagogical University, Yerevan 0010, Armenia – Institute of Physics and Technology, National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University, Tomsk 634050, Russia

^a e-mail: sguerin@u-bourgogne.fr

Received: 17 June 2016
Received in final form: 29 August 2016
Published online: 1 December 2016

Abstract

We develop the method of adiabatic tracking for photo- and magneto-association of Bose-Einstein atomic condensates with models that include Kerr type nonlinearities. We show that the inclusion of these terms can produce qualitatively important modifications in the adiabatic dynamics, like the appearance of bifurcations, in which the trajectory that is being tracked loses its stability. As a consequence the adiabatic theorem does not apply and the adiabatic transfer can be strongly degraded. This degradation can be compensated by using fields that are strong enough compared with the values of the Kerr terms. The main result is that, despite these potentially detrimental features, there is always a choice of the detuning that leads to an efficient adiabatic tracking, even for relatively weak fields.