In June 10th 1999, the Rubidium BEC1 apparatus produced the first italian Bose-Einstein condensate. We soon focused our activity on the study of a quantum gas of 87Rb bosons in optical lattices, investigating static and dynamic properties and enlightening the role of different kinds of instabilities. The last part of the activity was concentrated on the study of the superfluid to Mott insulator transition (also adding disorder and “quasi-disorder”) and on the physics of low-dimensional bosonic gases, characterized by measuring the excitation spectrum of these systems through inelastic light scattering. The BEC1 experiment retired in 2014 after 15 years of activity. We would like to thank all the people – students, technicians, and researchers – who have contributed to these exciting fifteen years of activity.

Energy and momentum transfer in stimulated light scattering

Rb Lab

In ultracold atoms settings, inelastic light scattering is a preeminent technique to reveal static and dynamic properties at nonzero momentum. In this work, we investigate an array of one-dimensional trapped Bose gases, by measuring both the energy and the momentum imparted to the system via light scattering experiments. The measurements are performed in the weak perturbation regime, where these two quantities — the energy and momentum transferred — are expected to be related to the dynamic structure factor of the system. We discuss this relation, with special attention to the role of in-trap dynamics on the transferred momentum.

N. Fabbri et al.,
Energy and momentum transfer in one-dimensional trapped gases by stimulated light scattering
New J. Phys. 17, 063012 (2015)

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