Abstract
Interferometry with trapped atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) requires the development of techniques to recombine the two paths of the interferometer and map the accumulated phase difference to a measurable atom number difference. We have implemented and compared two recombining procedures in a double-well based BEC interferometer. The first procedure utilizes the bosonic Josephson effect and controlled tunneling of atoms through the potential barrier, similar to laser light in an optical fibre coupler. The second one relies on the interference of the reflected and transmitted parts of the BEC wavefunction when impinging on the potential barrier, analogous to light impinging on a half-silvered mirror. Both schemes were implemented successfully, yielding an interferometric contrast of about 20% and 42% respectively. Building efficient matter wave recombiners represents an important step towards the coherent manipulation of external quantum superposition states of BECs.
Highlights
The most striking application of the wave character of matter is the construction of matter-wave interferometers [1]
The coherent manipulation of atoms in particular has required the development of an atom optics toolbox of beam splitters, phase shifters, recombiners, etc
The basics of the Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) Mach-Zehnder interferometer have been described in our previous publication, Ref. [27]
Summary
The most striking application of the wave character of matter is the construction of matter-wave interferometers [1]. Various interferometric schemes have been devised for BECs either using radio-frequency (rf) or microwave fields to perform a Ramsey sequence [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], or laser fields to drive Raman [10] or Bragg [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22] transitions Most of these schemes resort to free-falling clouds, which inherently limits the interrogation time to a few 100 ms (with the notable exception of experiments conducted in microgravity [21])
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