An optically thick cold atomic cloud emits a coherent flash of light in the forward direction when the phase of an incident probe field is abruptly changed. Because of cooperativity, the duration of this phenomena can be much shorter than the excited
lifetime of a single atom. Repeating periodically the abrupt phase jump, we generate a train of pulses with short repetition time, high intensity contrast and high efficiency. In this regime, the emission is fully governed by cooperativity even if the cloud is dilute.
This paper investigates quantum diffusion of matter waves in two-dimensional random potentials, focussing on expanding Bose-Einstein condensates in spatially correlated optical speckle potentials. Special care is taken to describe the effect of depha
sing, finite system size, and an initial momentum distribution. We derive general expressions for the interference-renormalized diffusion constant, the disorder-averaged probability density distribution, the variance of the expanding atomic cloud, and the localized fraction of atoms. These quantities are studied in detail for the special case of an inverted-parabola momentum distribution as obtained from an expanding condensate in the Thomas-Fermi regime. Lastly, we derive quantitative criteria for the unambiguous observation of localization effects in a possible 2D experiment.
In a recent Letter (Phys. Rev. Lett. textbf{98}, 083601 (2007), arXiv:cond-mat/0610804), O. Assaf and E. Akkermans claim that the angular correlations of the light intensity scattered by a cloud of cold atoms with internal degeneracy (Zeeman sublevel
s) of the ground state overcome the usual Rayleigh law. More precisely, they found that they become exponentially large with the size of the sample. In what follows, we will explain why their results are wrong and, in contrary, why the internal degeneracy leads to lower intensity correlations.
