Long-lived periodic revivals of coherence in an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate
Abstract
We observe the coherence of an interacting two-component Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) surviving for seconds in a trapped Ramsey interferometer. Mean-field driven collective oscillations of two components lead to periodic dephasing and rephasing of condensate wave functions with a slow decay of the interference fringe visibility. We apply spin echo synchronous with the self-rephasing of the condensate to reduce the influence of state-dependent atom losses, significantly enhancing the visibility up to 0.75 at the evolution time of 1.5s. Mean-field theory consistently predicts higher visibility than experimentally observed values. We quantify the effects of classical and quantum noise and infer a coherence time of 2.8 s for a trapped condensate of 5.5e4 interacting atoms.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1012.3813,
title = {Long-lived periodic revivals of coherence in an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate},
author = {Mikhail Egorov and Russell P. Anderson and Valentin Ivannikov and Bogdan Opanchuk and Peter Drummond and Brenton V. Hall and Andrei I. Sidorov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1012.3813},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
5 pages, 4 figures