ANALYSIS OF ATOMIC MIRRORS BASED ON LIGHT-INDUCED FORCES

We describe a numerical method for solving the problem of the interaction of e monoenergetic atomic beam represented by a plane wave with a classical light field at glancing incidence. In the approximation where spontaneous emission is simply treated as a loss, this leads to a vector Schrodinger equation which is solved using a matrix technique. This allows the analysis of arbitrary optical intensity profiles, rather than the rectangular profile previously considered by Zhang and Walls [Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 3287 (1992)]. Selected numerical results show that the method describes a variety of phenomena including state-selective reflection and velocity-tuned (doppleron) resonances.