Lévy flights of photons in hot atomic vapours

Details Lévy flights of photons in hot atomic vapours Lévy flights of photons in hot atomic vapours

2009-04-16

arxiv.org/abs/0904.2454v3

Nature Physics 5 (2009) 602

Physics

Atomic Physics

This final version is identical to the one published in Nature Physics

Scientific paper

Properties of random and fluctuating systems are often studied through the use of Gaussian distributions. However, in a number of situations, rare events have drastic consequences, which can not be explained by Gaussian statistics. Considerable efforts have thus been devoted to the study of non Gaussian fluctuations such as L\'evy statistics, generalizing the standard description of random walks. Unfortunately only macroscopic signatures, obtained by averaging over many random steps, are usually observed in physical systems. We present experimental results investigating the elementary process of anomalous diffusion of photons in hot atomic vapours. We measure the step size distribution of the random walk and show that it follows a power law characteristic of L\'evy flights.

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