Atom Lasers in Optical Lattices: The Next Generation of Coherent Matter Waves

The invention of the first optical lasers more than half a century ago marked the beginning of the ultimate control over light and lead to an unprecedented technological revolution. More recently, with the realization of Bose-Einstein condensation in atomic gases, we are entering an era in which a similar degree of control over matter waves is being achieved. Much effort has been devoted to developing techniques for converting the trapped atoms of a Bose-Einstein condensate into freely propagating coherent matter waves - the so called atom lasers. Those atom lasers are expected to become constituents in future scientific and technological devices. In this talk, we address the possibility of gaining unique control over coherent matter waves by enhancing interactions by means of optical lattices. We show that the free expansion of strongly interacting bosons in an optical  lattice, starting from an incoherent Mott insulator, leads to Bose-Einstein condensation at nonzero momenta. Those momenta can be fully controlled by tuning the lattice parameters, in turn controlled by optical lasers. The new correlated matter waves generated that way open unimaginable possibilities for technological applications and a new generation of lasers.