The Mystery of the Ramsey Fringe that Didn’t Chirp
D. M. Harber, H. J. Lew, J. M. McGuirk, Eric Cornell
Abstract
We use precision microwave spectroscopy of magnetically trapped, ultra-cold ⁸⁷Rb to characterize intra- and inter-state density correlations. The cold collision shifts for both normal and condensed clouds are measured. The results verify the presence of the sometimes controversial "factors of two", in normal-cloud mean-field energies, both within a particular state and between two distinct spin species. One might expect that as two spin species decohere, the inter-state factor of two would revert to unity, but the associated frequency chirp one naively expects from such a trend is not observed in our data.