Subluminal to superluminal propagation of an optical pulse in an f-deformed Bose- Einstein condensate

In this paper, we investigate the propagation of a weak optical probe pulse in an f-deformed Bose- Einstein condensate (BEC) of a gas with the -type three- level atoms in the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) regime. We use an f- deformed generalization of an effective two- level quantum model of the three- level configuration in which the Gardiner phonon operators for BEC are deformed by an operator- valued function, f(n), of the particle- number operator n. With making use of the quantum approach of the angular momentum theory we obtain the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the system up to first order approximation. We consider the collisions between the atoms as a special kind of f- deformation. The collision rate k is regarded as the deformation parameter and light propagation in the deformed BEC is analyzed. In particular, we show that the absorptive and dispersive properties of the deformed condensate can be controlled effectively by changing the deformation parameter k and the total number of atoms. We find that by increasing the value of k the group velocity of the probe pulse changes, through deformed condensate, from subluminal to superluminal.