Optics and Interferometry with Atoms and Molecules

By Jörg Schmiedmayer, M. Chapman, C. Ekstrom, T. Hammond, D. Kokorowski, A. Lenef, R. Rubenstein, Edward T. Smith, David E. Pritchard. 2009

1,131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses recent accomplishments in the atom and molecular optics and interferometry at MIT. The chapter begins with a discussion of the details of an experimental apparatus and gives an overview of recent accomplishments in atom and molecular optics. It then describes the atom and molecule interferometer, which is unique in that the two interfering components of the atom wave are spatially separated and can be physically isolated by a metal foil. The interferometer is especially well suited for the study of atomic and molecular properties as it enables one to apply different interactions to each of the two components of the wave function, which in turn permits spectroscopic precision in the study of interactions that shift the energy or phase of a single state of the atom. The chapter also describes an experiment in which this capability is used to determine the ground state polarizability of sodium to 0.3%—an order of magnitude improvement—by measuring the energy shift due to a uniform electric field applied to one component of the wave function. The chapter also provides an overview of the relativistic effects in electromagnetic interactions, and differential force interferometry.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be04b3ec10779e2b28548d3bf80b21ee41eb2ac1

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum-enhanced measurements without entanglement (2017, background): “…which the quantum-enhanced measurement paradigm has been studied are in fact interferometers based on ultracold atoms confined in optical lattices (Cronin et al., 2009; Gerry and Knight, 2005; Giorgini et al., 2008; Haroche and Raimond, 2006; Inguscio et al., 2006; Köhl and Esslinger, 2006;…”
Atomic Sensors – A Review (2011, background): “Several reviews of atomic interferometry have been published previously [14], [91]–[95].”
On-chip quantum interference of a superconducting microsphere (2016, methodology): “Should the decoherence from the surface be a hindering factor, one could also consider implementing the interferometer protocol in free fall [3] with external magnetic potentials speeding-up the dynamics, as in step 2 and 6 of the protocol.”
The Neutron and Its Role in Cosmology and Particle Physics (2011, background): “Nowadays, atomic physics experiments have become very competitive in testing the gravitational interaction, for references see Cronin et al. (2009). Experiments with atoms have a number of advantages, among them high intensity, ease of manipulation, and portability.”
Measurement of the fine-structure constant as a test of the Standard Model (2018, methodology): “ and the atom-to-electron mass ratio ðm At m eÞisknowntobetterthan0.1ppbformanyspecies.Here, crepresentsthespeedoflightinvacuum. The fundamental tool of our experiment is a matter-wave interferometer (8, 9). Similar to an opticalinterferometer, thisapparatussplitswaves from a coherent source along d”
Spin squeezing, entanglement and quantum metrology with Bose–Einstein condensates (2012, background): “Reviews covering atom interferometry both experimentally and theoretically can be found in [15, 45, 46, 48].”
Quantum interference experiments with large molecules (2003, methodology): “The overall effect yields the optomechanical coupling, which should enable us to cool down to the ground state the mechanical motion [9]–[11].”
Precision measurement of the Newtonian gravitational constant using cold atoms (2014, methodology): “The analysis to extract the value ofG from the data involved the following steps: (1) calculation of the gravitational potential produced by the source masses, (2) calculation of the phase shift for single atom trajectories, (3) Monte Carlo simulation of the atomic cloud, (4) calculation of the corr”