Internal State Conversion in Ultracold Gases

We consider an ultracold gas of (noncondensed) bosons or fermions with two internal states, and we study the effect of a gradient of the transition frequency between these states. When a $\pi /2\mathrm{}$ rf pulse is applied to the sample, exchange effects during collisions transfer the atoms into internal states which depend on the direction of their velocity. This results, after a short time, in a spatial separation between the two states. A kinetic equation is solved analytically and numerically; the results agree well with the recent observations of Lewandowski et al.