Analysing spatiotemporal instabilities in magneto-optical traps with the tools of turbulence theory

Abstract

Abstract A large cloud of 87Rb atoms confined in a magneto-optical trap exhibits, in a certain regime of parameters, spatiotemporal instabilities with a dynamics resembling that of a turbulent fluid. We apply the methods of turbulence theory based on structure function analysis to extract scaling exponents which are compared to known turbulent regimes. This analysis also allows us to make a clear distinction between different instability regimes.