abstract

• We report a continuousmeasurement of the spin state of a spinor BEC. A far off-resonant linearly polarised probe beam illuminates a sodium spinor condensate in F=1. The beam is Faraday rotated in proportion to the spin component along the beam propagation direction, and the rotation measured at the shot-noise limit with an autobalanced polarimeter. The measurement is minimallydestructive and continuous. As the condensate spin Larmor precesses in a weak magnetic bias field, the Faraday signal oscillates at the Larmor frequency, typically of order 50 kHz. We investigate this novel measurement for monitoring spin-mixing and decoherence processes in real time. © 2007 Optical Society of America.

authors

• Black A.T.
• Gómez García Eduardo
• Jung S.
• Lett P.D.
• Turner L.D.

publication date

• 2007-01-01

published in

• Optics InfoBase Conference Papers  Proceedings

keywords

• Decoherence process; Larmor frequencies; Magnetic bias fields; Probe beam; Propagation direction; Spin components; Spin state; Spinor condensates

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