A coherent atomic beam generator

Summary form only given. The availability of ultracold atoms, as well as the recent demonstration of Bose condensation for trapped alkali, have lead to renewed efforts to produce a coherent atomic beam generator, or "atom laser". In this talk we discuss such a scheme based on a driven-damped sample of ultracold atoms in an extended, quasi-one-dimentional cavity. An important aspect of our scheme is that the atoms are subjected to the near-resonant dipole-dipole interaction whose collisional cross section can be tuned over several orders of magnitude by varying the atom-field detuning and the precise geometry of the cavity.