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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Atomic beam propagation effects: index of refraction and longitudinal tomography

David A. Kokorowski, Troy D. Hammond, Edward T. Smith, Richard A. Rubenstein, Al-Amin Dhirani, Jörg Schmiedmayer, David E. Pritchard

Published May 1, 1997• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present initial measurements of the dispersive index of refraction for sodium matter waves passing through argon. In addition, we describe a novel scheme for performing tomography on the longitudinal quantum state of particles in an atomic beam.
DOI
10.1117/12.273768

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We have performed the first detailed calculation of the index of refraction of a gas (argon) for an atomic wave (sodium). The index depends rapidly on the wave vector k r describing the relative motion and exhibits two interesting effects: Breit-Wigner-type resonances at very low k r values, and intense glory oscillations over a large range of k r values. A recent experiment has measured this index of refraction, and our calculation using a very accurate sodium-argon potential and taking into account the thermal motion of argon, agrees quite well with the experimental result.