Spatial quasiperiodic driving of a dissipative optical lattice and the origin of directed Brillouin modes in a randomly diffusing cold atom cloud

Atoms confined in a three-dimensional dissipative optical lattice oscillate inside potential wells, occasionally hopping to adjacent wells, thereby diffusing in all directions. Illumination by a weak probe beam modulates the lattice, yielding propagating atomic density waves, referred to as Brillouin modes, which travel perpendicular to the direction of travel of the probe. The probe is made incident at a small angle relative to a lattice symmetry axis, yielding a driving potential perturbation whose spatial period is not a multiple of the period of the underlying optical potential, thus enabling exploration of the regime of space quasiperiodic drive. A theory, based on the Fourier decomposition of the current into its atomic density wave contributions, reveals that, unlike the previously studied time quasiperiodic case, wherein a lattice driven by two incommensurate frequencies may exhibit abrupt suppression in directed current as the driving transitions from quasiperiodic to periodic, a spatial-quasiperiodically driven lattice exhibits no such abrupt response. Further, detailed modeling of spatial-quasiperiodically driven lattices reveals that directed propagation occurs not only as a consequence of velocity matching between the propagating modulation and the average velocity of the atom oscillating inside a well, as was previously reported in the literature, but also as a distinct consequence of another mechanism, namely, frequency matching between the modulation frequency and the oscillation frequencies. A systematic measurement of the transmitted probe spectra as a function of off-axis probe angle is presented, which is consistent with the velocity- and frequency-matching predictions from the detailed model.