Coherence of the two-level atom bichromatic beam splitter

Abstract

The recently proposed two-level atom bichromatic beam splitter has been shown theoretically to give exceptionally clean beam splitting in momentum space. In this paper, we investigate the first-order coherence property of this beam splitter, which is an important test of its usefulness in interferometric applications. We find that the beam splitter exhibits maximum fringe visibility of 0.3, which may be increased significantly through conditioning on certain variables. We then propose a type of atom interferometer based on this system, which has many desirable properties when compared with existing versions.