Generating quadrature squeezing in an atom laser through self-interaction

Abstract

We describe a scheme for creating quadrature- and intensity-squeezed atom lasers that do not require squeezed light as an input. The beam becomes squeezed due to nonlinear interactions between the atoms in the beam in an analogue to optical Kerr squeezing. We develop an analytic model of the process which we compare to a detailed stochastic simulation of the system using phase space methods. Finally we show that significant squeezing can be obtained in an experimentally realistic system and suggest ways of increasing the tunability of the squeezing.