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Journal de Physique IV (Proceedings)

Diffraction phases in atom interferometry

M Büchner, R. Delhuille, Alain Miffre, C. Mennerat-Robilliard, C. Champenois, J. Vigué

Published Nov 1, 2004• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

\nUsing Bloch states to describe atomic motion, we show how to calculate the phase shifts associated to atomic diffraction by a laser standing wave and we illustrate our calculation by the evaluation of the phase shifts in the contrast interferometer developed by D. Pritchard and co-workers [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 140401 (2002)].\n
DOI
10.1051/jp4:2004119026

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Diffraction of atoms by lasers is a very important tool for matter wave optics. Although the process is well understood, the phase shifts induced by this diffraction process are not well known. In this paper, we make analytical calculations of these phase shifts in some simple cases and use these results to model the contrast interferometer recently built by Pritchard and co-workers. We thus show that the values of the diffraction phases are large and that they probably contribute to the phase noise observed in this experiment.
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