Abstract
The analogs of optical elements in light-pulse atom interferometers are generated from the interaction of matter waves with light fields. As such, these fields possess quantum properties, which fundamentally lead to a reduced visibility in the observed interference. This loss is a consequence of the encoded information about the atom's path. However, the quantum nature of the atom-optical elements also gives an additional degree of freedom to reduce such effects: We demonstrate that entanglement between all light fields can be used to erase information about the atom's path and by that to partially recover the visibility. Thus, our work highlights the role of complementarity on atom-interferometric experiments.
Highlights
Light-pulse atom interferometry [1,2,3] is a powerful tool with unique applications [4], such as high-precision gravimeters [5], gyroscopes [6], and tests of fundamental physics [7,8,9,10]
This way, we shed light on aspects of complementarity: the connection between a reduced visibility of the interference signal and the corresponding presence of full welcher-Weg information [2,11,35,36,37] encoded into the light fields
A trace over all fields results in only half of the cases in a distinct determination of the atom’s path. This fact explains the improvement of the visibility to 1/2 but not to unity for high photon numbers, because there is still partial welcher-Weg information encoded into the light fields
Summary
Light-pulse atom interferometry [1,2,3] is a powerful tool with unique applications [4], such as high-precision gravimeters [5], gyroscopes [6], and tests of fundamental physics [7,8,9,10]. Information about an atom’s path may be encoded into light fields and give rise to a significant drop in visibility Such effects on atom interferometers have already been studied [17], and superpositions are one possible route to overcoming such issues, where, as a prime example, intensive coherent states give rise to the classical limit. We study initial entanglement of atomic beam splitters and mirrors in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer to partially restore the loss of visibility arising from quantized pulses This way, we shed light on aspects of complementarity: the connection between a reduced visibility of the interference signal and the corresponding presence of full welcher-Weg (which-way) information [2,11,35,36,37] encoded into the light fields. While quantum eraser experiments [38,39] overcome this obstacle by erasing the information after the measurement, we use initial entanglement to suppress the physical process of imprinting welcher-Weg information
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