Control of Interaction-Induced Dephasing of Bloch Oscillations
Abstract
We report on the control of interaction-induced dephasing of Bloch oscillations for an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice under the influence of gravity. When tuning the strength of the interaction towards zero by means of a Feshbach resonance, the dephasing time is increased from a few to more than twenty thousand Bloch oscillation periods. We quantify the dephasing in terms of the width of the quasi-momentum distribution and measure its dependence on time for different values of the scattering length. Minimizing the dephasing allows us to realize a BEC-based atom interferometer in the non-interacting limit. We use it for a precise determination of a zero-crossing for the atomic scattering length and to observe collapse and revivals of Bloch oscillations when the atomic sample is subject to a spatial force gradient.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0710.5083,
title = {Control of Interaction-Induced Dephasing of Bloch Oscillations},
author = {M. Gustavsson and E. Haller and M. J. Mark and J. G. Danzl and G. Rojas-Kopeinig and H. -C. Naegerl},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0710.5083},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 5 figures