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High contrast Mach-Zehnder lithium atom interferometer in the Bragg regime

R. Delhuille, C. Champenois, M Büchner, Leszek Jozefowski, Carlo Rizzo, G. Trénec, J. Vigué

Published Nov 8, 2001• 17 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We have constructed an atom interferometer of the Mach-Zehnder type, operating with a thermal lithium beam. Atom diffraction uses Bragg diffraction on laser standing waves. With first order diffraction, our apparatus has given a large signal and a very good fringe contrast (74%, which we believe to be the highest ever observed with atom interferometers. This apparatus will be applied to high sensitivity measurements

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We have constructed an atom interferometer of the Mach-Zehnder type, operating with a thermal lithium beam. Atom diffraction uses Bragg diffraction on laser standing waves. With first order diffraction, our apparatus has given a large signal and a very good fringe contrast (74%, which we believe to be the highest ever observed with atom interferometers. This apparatus will be applied to high sensitivity measurements
\nWe have built an atom interferometer of the Mach-Zehnder type, operating with thermal lithium atoms [1]. Its design is largely inspired by previous works done by the groups of D. Pritchard [2], A. Zeilinger [3] and S.A. Lee [4]. In our apparatus, the atomic wave is diffracted in the Bragg regime by three laser sanding waves to achieve a Mach-Zehnder configuration. This paper briefly recalls the diffraction process and shows the experimental results obtained in our group. Our apparatus is able to achieve a high fringe contrast of 74 % with a large mean detected atom flux of 1.5times1041.5 \\times 10^{4}1.5times104s−1^{-1}−1. Finally, the paper ends with the measurement of the velocity distribution of our lithium beam using a light induced fluorescence technique.\n
We have built and operated an atom interferometer of the Mach-Zehnder type. The atomic wave is a supersonic beam of lithium seeded in argon and the mirrors and beam-splitters for the atomic wave are based on elastic Bragg diffraction on laser standing waves at 671 nm. We give here a detailed description of our experimental setup and of the procedures used to align its components. We then present experimental signals, exhibiting atomic interference effects with a very high visibility, up to 84.5 %. We describe a series of experiments testing the sensitivity of the fringe visibility to the main alignment defects and to the magnetic field gradient.
\nWe have built an atom interferometer of the Mach Zehnder type. The\natomic wave (lambdaitdB=54\\lambda_{\\it dB}=54lambdaitdB​=54 pm) is a supersonic beam of\nlithium seeded in argon. The realization of mirrors and beams\nsplitters for the atomic wave relies on elastic Bragg diffraction on\nlaser standing waves at lambda=671\\lambda= 671lambda=671 nm. We first present our\nexperimental setup and signals with atomic fringes which exhibit a\nvery high visibility, up to 84.5pm184.5 \\pm 1 \\%84.5pm1, and a very large phase\nsensitivity. This phase sensitivity is then used to perform an\nabsolute measurement of the lithium atom electric polarizability by\napplying an electric field on only one atomic beam in the\ninterferometer. Our result, $\\alpha= (24.33 \\pm 0.16) \\times\n10^{-30}$ m3^33, reduces by a factor three the uncertainty of the\nbest previous measurement.\n
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 developed a Mach-Zehnder atom interferometer which uses elastic diffraction of lithium atom on laser standing waves for the coherent manipulation of the atom wave. The interference signal is of sufficient quality to achieve a phase sensitivity near 10 milliradians/. With this apparatus, we have recently measured the index of refraction of several gases for lithium waves. The interference signals give access to the real and imaginary parts of () and we have tested the linear dependence of these two quantities with gas density. The measured values of () are in good agreement with calculations and they exhibit glory oscillations, as predicted by theory.
We construct a Mach-Zehnder interferometer using Bose-Einstein condensed rubidium atoms and optical Bragg diffraction. In contrast to interferometers based on normal diffraction, where only a small percentage of the atoms contribute to the signal, our Bragg diffraction interferometer uses all the condensate atoms. The condensate coherence properties and high phase-space density result in an interference pattern of nearly 100% contrast. The two arms of the interferometer may be completely separated in space, making it an ideal tool that can be used to detect vortices or other topological condensate phases.