Experimental generation of phase wraps for subwavelength phase structures in Bose-Einstein condensate with two-dimensional optical lattice

Abstract: We report an experimental demonstration of engineering phase wraps for sub-wavelength structure in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with two-dimensional optical lattices. A short lattice pulse is applied on BEC working in the Kapitza-Dirac (or Raman-Nath) regime, which corresponds to phase modulation imprint on matter wave. When the phase modulation on matter wave is larger than $2\pi$ in a lattice cell, there appears phase wraps with multiple $2\pi$ jumps, generating the sub-wavelength phase structure. The phase wraps for sub-wavelength structure are measured in momentum space via the time-of-flight absorption image, which corresponds to converting phase information into amplitude. %Two different kinds of two-dimensional optical lattice are studied, which show the different subwavelength phase structure. Moreover, we identify an additional condition for the validity of Kapitza-Dirac regime, which relies crucially on the lattice configurations. This scheme can be used for studying the property of optical lattices and topological defects in matter wave.