Matter-wave interferometry in a double well on an atom chip

By Thorsten Schumm, Sebastian Hofferberth, L. Andersson, S. Wildermuth, S. Groth, I. Bar-Joseph, Jörg Schmiedmayer, P. Krüger. 2005

645 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Matter-wave interference experiments enable us to study matter at its most basic, quantum level and form the basis of high-precision sensors for applications such as inertial and gravitational field sensing. Success in both of these pursuits requires the development of atom-optical elements that can manipulate matter waves at the same time as preserving their coherence and phase. Here, we present an integrated interferometer based on a simple, coherent matter-wave beam splitter constructed on an atom chip. Through the use of radio-frequency-induced adiabatic double-well potentials, we demonstrate the splitting of Bose–Einstein condensates into two clouds separated by distances ranging from 3 to 80 μm, enabling access to both tunnelling and isolated regimes. Moreover, by analysing the interference patterns formed by combining two clouds of ultracold atoms originating from a single condensate, we measure the deterministic phase evolution throughout the splitting process. We show that we can control the relative phase between the two fully separated samples and that our beam splitter is phase-preserving.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44c6d68e15743d786c4a84125a0609de49c8f1b3

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Citations in the corpus

A Kapitza–Dirac–Talbot–Lau interferometer for highly polarizable molecules (2007, background): “Research on matter waves is a thriving field of quantum physics and has recently stimulated many investigations with electrons [1], neutrons [2], atoms [3], Bosecondensed ensembles [4], cold clusters [5] and hot molecules [6].”
Coherent manipulation of Bose–Einstein condensates with state-dependent microwave potentials on an atom chip (2009, background): “Coherent manipulation of internal [12] and motional [13, 14] states on atom chips has been demonstrated in separate experiments.”
Magnetic microtraps for ultracold atoms (2007, methodology): “This approach has been pioneered experimentally by Colombe et al. 2004 and used by Schumm et al. 2005b and Jo et al. 2006 to split a condensate initially prepared in a single-well into a double-well potential Sec.”
Atom-chip-based generation of entanglement for quantum metrology (2010, methodology): “In [8], it has been used to reconstruct the Wigner”
Quantum metrology with nonclassical states of atomic ensembles (2016, background): “, 2006) that dynamically deforms the static magnetic trap into a double-well potential (Schumm et al., 2005).”
Probing quantum and thermal noise in an interacting many-body system (2007, methodology): “The initial trapping configuration is then deformed along the transverse direction into a highly anisotropic double-well potential by means of radio-frequency-induced adiabatic potentials [23, 25].”
Time-Dependent Impurity in Ultracold Fermions: Orthogonality Catastrophe and Beyond (2012, background): “While it was originally designed for metrology applications, it has been realized recently that it can also be used as a probe of many-body dynamics [8,61–65].”
Atom Interferometers (2007, methodology): “The Heidelberg experiments (Hofferberth et al., 2006; Schumm et al., 2005) are remarkable since they were performed with 1d BEC (chemical potential μ < ~ω⊥), much longer then the phase coherence length.”
A bosonic Josephson junction (2007, methodology): “Recently these potentials were employed for coherent splitting of a Bose–Einstein condensate and for matter wave interference experiments [56].”
Twin-atom beams (2010, methodology): “This is accomplished by creating unequal level spacings in the radial y z -plane by radio frequency dressin”
Fermi gases in one dimension: From Bethe ansatz to experiments (2013, methodology): “The techniques of atomic interferometry have been widely used to explore the phase coherence and fluctuations between different 1D gases (Hofferberth et al., 2008; Jo et al., 2007a,b,c; Krüger et al., 2010; Schumm et al., 2005).”