Abstract

Optical lattices are physical systems composed of atoms that are cooled and trapped in an interference pattern. These systems share some properties with solid state materials due to the similarities between the hamiltonians that describe the atomic motion in the laser light and the electronic motion in the ion matrix of a crystal. As recently demonstrated [1], it is possible to obtain quasiperiodic optical potentials that show trapping efficiencies comparable to that of the periodic lattices. In this situation, optical lattices become the atomic enalogue of the solid state quasicrystals, an intriguing new class of solids discovered in 1984 by Shechtman et al [2]. In this paper we present an experimental and numerical study of the atomic transport in an optical quasicrystal. The interest of this study is twofold: firstly we obtained experimental results by a direct imaging technique on the atomic diffusion in an optical lattice; secondly we compared the diffusion along the periodic and quasiperiodic directions to understand the influence of quasiperiodicity on the transport.

© 1998 IEEE