We study the Josephson oscillation and self-trapping dynamics of a cigar-shaped dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate of 52Cr atoms polarized along the symmetry axis of an axially symmetric double-well potential using the numerical solution of a mean-field model, for dominating repulsive contact interaction (large positive scattering length a) over an anisotropic dipolar interaction. Josephson-type oscillation emerges for small and very large numbers of atoms, whereas self-trapping is noted for an intermediate number of atoms. The dipolar interaction pushes the system away from self-trapping towards Josephson oscillation. We consider a simple two-mode description for a qualitative understanding of the dynamics.
We demonstrate the operation of an atom interferometer based on a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate. We strongly reduce the interaction induced decoherence that usually limits interferometers based on trapped condensates by tuning the s-wave scattering length almost to zero via a magnetic Feshbach resonance. We employ a 39K condensate trapped in an optical lattice, where Bloch oscillations are forced by gravity. The fine-tuning of the scattering length down to 0.1 a_(0) and the micrometric sizes of the atomic sample make our system a very promising candidate for measuring forces with high spatial resolution. Our technique can be in principle extended to other measurement schemes opening new possibilities in the field of trapped atom interferometry.