Testing the equivalence between the canonical and Minkowski momentum of light with ultracold atoms

Abstract

We design an experimental system to test the equivalence between the canonical and Minkowski momentum of light, which can provide a judgment on the recent resolution of the century-old Abraham-Minkowski controversy by S. M. Barnett [Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 070401 (2010)]. By measuring the recoil momentum of ultracold rubidium atoms in a rubidium Bose-Einstein condensate after the electromagnetically induced absorption of a monochromatic laser pulse, the momentum of the pulse in the ultracold atoms can be obtained. If the equivalence is valid, the measured results will coincide with the theoretical values of the canonical momentum of the pulse. Otherwise, if the equivalence is invalid, the measured results will coincide with the theoretical values of the Minkowski momentum, which are significantly different from that of the canonical momentum. Our scheme is amethod to test the equivalence between the canonical and Minkowski momentum of light. It can also be improved to distinguish between the Minkowski and Abraham momenta to contribute to the study of the Abraham-Minkowski controversy in the future.

Momentum of light in complex media

“…where the electromagnetic field Lagrangian is given by ( 12) with the constitutive tensor (152), whereas the matter Lagrangian is a sum…”

“…Lately, the discussion of the optical momentum in media has been revisited in view of an increasing interest in the study of optical forces in nanotechnology [9,46,58] and metamaterials [34,59,75]. New theoretical research [23, 29, 30, 38, 55, 67, 76, 77, 84, 93-96, 100, 104, 105, 107, 113, 140] and also new experiments [10,32,81,126,127,136,151,152] have been reported recently, still trying to judge between the Abraham or Minkowski tensors unequivocally. In most cases, the electromagnetic field was discussed alone without analyzing the dynamics of matter, with just a few exceptions [106,114,119,[137][138][139], where a coupled system "matter+field" was studied in the spirit of [117,118].…”