Accelerated guided atomic pulse

Abstract

The deleterious effects of dispersion on a propagating coherent atomic pulse, along the axis of a traveling-wave laser beam, can be ameliorated by the nonlinear self-interacting force due to dipole-dipole coupling between atoms. We show that a wide atomic pulse with a particular profile can retain its shape during propagation and, moreover, the momentum of the pulse increases due to photon absorption. For the wide soliton case, we demonstrate analytically that the self-interacting atomic force scales inversely with the third power of the pulse width. © 1997 The American Physical Society.