Regular Article

Effects of the nonlinear interactions on the tunneling time of ultracold atoms

¹ School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, P.R. China
² Quantum Optics Lab, Department of Physics, COMSATS University, Islamabad, Pakistan
³ College of Science, Zhongyuan University of Technology, 41 Zhongyuan Road, Zhengzhou 450000, P.R. China

^a e-mail: fazalbadshah30@gmail.com
^b e-mail: gqge@hust.edu.cn

Received: 2 August 2018
Received in final form: 19 December 2018
Published online: 12 March 2019

Abstract

We study the tunneling of ultraslow two-level atoms through a high-Q microwave cavity in the presence of Kerr type nonlinearity. It is found that the phase time of traversal is significantly modified by the nonlinear effects of the cavity field. Specifically, when an appropriate nonlinearity is introduced one may obtain alternate sub and superclassical traversal behaviors of the tunneling time with increasing energies of the incident atoms. It is due to an increase in the number of resonances in the transmission amplitude induced by the Kerr field. Further, in the presence of Kerr medium the scattering like nature of the interaction, i.e., the mazer action may be realized for somewhat higher values of energies of the incident cold atoms. In addition, phase time can be switched from sub to superclassical values by adjusting strength of the Kerr nonlinearity.