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Physical Review A

Double-slit interference with ultracold metastable neon atoms

Fujio Shimizu, Kazuko Shimizu, Hiroshi Takuma

Published Jul 1, 1992• 129 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A double-slit interference of ultracold neon atoms in the 1${\mathit{s}}_{3}$ metastable state is studied. The interferometer is aligned vertically, and because of gravity acceleration the atom changes its velocity as much as 2 m/s during the passage of the interference. The interference fringes are observed for the initial atomic velocity between 0 and 2 m/s.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.46.r17

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A double-slit interference of ultracold neon atoms in the 1s3{\mathit{s}}_{3}s3​ metastable state is studied. The interferometer is aligned vertically, and because of gravity acceleration the atom changes its velocity as much as 2 m/s during the passage of the interference. The interference fringes are observed for the initial atomic velocity between 0 and 2 m/s.
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 by Bragg deflecting a collimated beam of metastable neon atoms from three parallel standing waves. Interference fringes have been observed using atoms Bragg scattered at up to the third order, giving a maximum of $6\ensuremath{\Elzxh}k$ transverse momentum difference between the two arms of the interferometer. In the first order case we have achieved a fringe contrast of 62% and a peak to peak signal of 1700 atoms/s. We believe this to be the highest fringe contrast that has been achieved in atom interferometers.
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.