Anomalous diffusion and Tsallis statistics in an optical lattice

We point out a connection between anomalous transport in an optical lattice and Tsallis' generalized statistics. Specifically, we show that the momentum equation for the semiclassical Wigner function which describes atomic motion in the optical potential, belongs to a class of transport equations recently studied by Borland [Phys. Lett. A 245, 67 (1998)]. The important property of these ordinary linear Fokker-Planck equations is that their stationary solutions are exactly given by Tsallis distributions. An analytical expression of the Tsallis index q in terms of the microscopic parameters of the quantum-optical problem is given and the spatial coherence of the atomic wave packets is discussed.