Splitting Matter Waves with Light

Yuping Huang

S. Inouye, Tilman Pfau, Subhadeep Gupta +4 more

Summary form only given. Atomic matter waves, just like electromagnetic waves, can be focused, reflected, guided and split by the passive atom optical elements of today. However, the key for many applications of RF and light waves lies in the availability of amplifiers. Here, we report the observation of phase coherent amplification of atomic matter waves.

Pierre Meystre

Oksana Streltsova, Alexej I. Streltsov

Matter-wave interferometry of ultra-cold atoms with attractive interactions is studied at the full many-body level. First, we study how a coherent light-pulse applied to an initially-condensed solitonic system splits it into two matter-waves. The split system looses its coherence and develops correlations with time, and inevitably becomes fragmented due to inter-particle attractions. Next, we show that by re-colliding the sub-clouds constituting the split density together, along with a simultaneous application of the same laser-pulse, one creates three matter-waves propagating with different momenta. We demonstrate that the number of atoms in the sub-cloud with zero-momentum is directly proportional to the degree of fragmentation in the system. This interferometric-based protocol to discriminate, probe, and measure the fragmentation is general and can be applied to ultra-cold systems with attractive, repulsive, short- and long-range interactions.

Victor F. Weisskopf

Yang Guo

Atom interferometers detect inertial effects with considerably larger sensitivity than that of traditional light wave interferometers. They uti- lize the relative small group velocity of coherent matter waves for more precise measurements, which is crucial for possible next-generation in- ertial navigation systems. In a hybrid optical dipole and magnetic trap system we generate Bose-Einstein condensates to be used as the source of matter waves for atom interferometry. We use tailored light pulse sequences to induce Kapitza-Dirac diffraction in the condensates, splitting them into multiple parts at discrete momentum orders. Nu- merical simulation and experimental realization is given for novel pulse sequences that splits ±4hk momentum orders.