We study a hybrid optomechanical system consisting of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) trapped inside a single-mode optical cavity with a moving end-mirror. The intracavity light field has a dual role: it excites a momentum side-mode of the condensate, and acts as a nonlinear spring that couples the vibrating mirror to that collective density excitation. We present the dynamics in a regime where the intracavity optical field, the mirror, and the side-mode excitation all display bistable behavior. In this regime we find that the dynamics of the system exhibits Hamiltonian chaos for appropriate initial conditions.

We study the reflection of two counter-propagating modes of the light field in a ring resonator by ultracold atoms either in the Mott insulator state or in the superfluid state of an optical lattice. We obtain exact numerical results for a simple two-well model and carry out statistical calculations appropriate for the full lattice case. We find that the dynamics of the reflected light strongly depends on both the lattice spacing and the state of the matter-wave field. Depending on the lattice spacing, the light field is sensitive to various density-density correlation functions of the atoms. The light field and the atoms become strongly entangled if the latter are in a superfluid state, in which case the photon statistics typically exhibit complicated multimodal structures.Comment: 10 pages revtex, 13 figure

We consider a cavity optomechanical system consisting of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) interacting with two counterpropagating traveling-wave modes in an optical ring cavity. In contrast to the more familiar case where the condensate is driven by the standing-wave field of a high-Q Fabry-Pérot cavity we find that both symmetric and antisymmetric collective density side modes of the BEC are mechanically excited by the light field. In the semiclassical, mean-field limit where the light field and the zero-momentum mode of the condensate are treated classically the system is found to exhibit a rich multistable behavior, including the appearance of isolated branches of solutions (isolas). We also present examples of the dynamics of the system as input parameters such as the frequency of the driving lasers are varied.