Atomic population distribution in the output ports of cold-atom interferometers with optical splitting and recombination
- Department of Physics, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 100 Institute Road, Worcester, Massachusetts 01609 (United States)
Cold-atom interferometers with optical splitting and recombination use off-resonant laser beams to split a cloud of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) into two clouds that travel along different paths and are then recombined again using optical beams. After the recombination, the BEC in general populates both the cloud at rest and the moving clouds. Measuring a relative number of atoms in each of these clouds yields information about the relative phase shift accumulated by the atoms in the two moving clouds during the interferometric cycle. We derive the expression for the probability of finding any given number of atoms in each of the clouds, discuss features of the probability density distribution, analyze its dependence on the relative accumulated phase shift as a function of the strength of the interatomic interactions, and compare our results with experiment.
- OSTI ID:
- 21528683
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. A, Vol. 82, Issue 5; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.82.053603; (c) 2010 The American Physical Society; ISSN 1050-2947
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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