Damped Bloch oscillations of cold atoms in optical lattices

Abstract

The paper studies Bloch oscillations of cold neutral atoms in the optical lattice. The effect of spontaneous emission on the dynamics of the system is analyzed both analytically and numerically. The spontaneous emission is shown to cause (i) the decay of Bloch oscillations with the decrement given by the rate of spontaneous emission and (ii) the diffusive spreading of the atoms with a diffusion coefficient depending on {\em both} the rate of spontaneous emission and the Bloch frequency.