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Physical Review Letters

Young’s double-slit experiment with atoms: A simple atom interferometer

O. Carnal, J. Mlynek

Published May 27, 1991• 627 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An atomic interferometer based on a Young's-type double-slit arrangement has been demonstrated. A supersonic beam of metastable helium atoms passes through a 2-\ensuremath{\mu}m-wide slit in a thin gold foil. This transversely coherent beam impinges on a second microfabricated transmission structure, consisting of two 1-\ensuremath{\mu}m-wide slits at a lateral distance of 8 \ensuremath{\mu}m. This double slit defines two possible paths on which the atoms can reach the detector slit. The good visibility of the observed fringes should make it possible to measure differential phase shifts in the interferometer of 1/3 rad in less than 10 min.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.66.2689

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An atomic interferometer based on a Young's-type double-slit arrangement has been demonstrated. A supersonic beam of metastable helium atoms passes through a 2-\ensuremath{\mu}m-wide slit in a thin gold foil. This transversely coherent beam impinges on a second microfabricated transmission structure, consisting of two 1-\ensuremath{\mu}m-wide slits at a lateral distance of 8 \ensuremath{\mu}m. This double slit defines two possible paths on which the atoms can reach the detector slit. The good visibility of the observed fringes should make it possible to measure differential phase shifts in the interferometer of 1/3 rad in less than 10 min.
We have constructed an atom interferometer using three 200 nm period transmission gratings. The two interfering portions of each atom’s wave pass on opposite sides of a stretched metal foil. A fringe amplitude of up to 900 cps is observed, which allows us to determine the phase to 15 milliradians in 1 minute. By applying different interactions to the two sides of the interferometer, we have determined the electric polarizability of the ground state of sodium, the coherence length of our beam, and the differential phase shifts and coherences of the different Zeeman ground states in a magnetic field. Some future prospects of separated beam experiments are discussed.
We have measured the diffraction of metastable helium atoms by a transmission grating with a period of 500 nm. The atomic beam is derived from a supersonic nozzle by adiabatic gas expansion with a velocity ratio v/Δv 20; with the nozzle cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature, the corresponding de Broglie wave length of the helium atoms is 1.08 Å. We have observed diffraction peaks up to the third order with a good signal-to-noise ratio. The position and the height of the different orders are in satisfactory agreement with the measured grating shape and the mean velocity in the atomic beam. As was pointed out previously, such transmission gratings offer one way to realize an atom-wave interferometer.1 In this context, our results demonstrate that an efficient diffraction can also be obtained with excited-state atoms: Here the use of metastable rare-gas atoms is of special interest because they are easy to handle and can be detected on almost zero background. As an alternative to the use of transmission gratings in matter-wave interferometry, we also discuss a simple double-slit arrangement that may provide another approach to the study of atomic interference phenomena.
An experiment is described which is an analog of Young's double-slit interferometer using an atomic electron instead of light. Two phase-coherent laser pulses are used to excite a single electron into a state of the form of a pair of Rydberg wave packets that are initially on opposite sides of the orbit. The two wave packets propagate and spread until they completely overlap, then a third phase-coherent laser pulse probes the resulting fringe pattern. The relative phase of the two wave packets is varied so that the interference produces a single localized electron wave packet on one side of the orbit or the other.
Young's double slit experiment has often been used to illustrate the concept of complementarity in quantum mechanics. If information can in principle be obtained about the path of the photon, then the visibility of the interference fringes is reduced or even destroyed. This Gedanken experiment discussed by Bohr and Einstein can be realized when the slit is replaced by individual atoms sensitive to the transferred recoil momentum of a photon which "passes through the slit". Early pioneering experiments were done with trapped ions and atom pairs created via photo-dissociation. Recently, it became possible to perform interference experiments with single neutral atoms cooled to the absolute ground state of a harmonic oscillator potential. The slits are now single atoms representing a two-level system, and the excitation in the harmonic oscillator potential is the which-way marker. In this note, we analyze and generalize two recent experiments performed with single atoms and emphasize the different ways they record which-way information.
Complementarity lies at the heart of conceptual foundation of orthodox quantum mechanics. The wave-particle duality makes it impossible to tell which slit each particle passes through and still observe an interference pattern in a Young's double-slit experiment. In this paper, this duality is appraised under the standard formulation of quantum mechanics for atom interferometers. It is found that the internal freedoms like electronic states of an atom can be used to detect the which-path information of each atom while uphold the interference pattern of atoms when the center-of-mass motion of atoms is detected.