A beam splitter is an important component of an atomic/optical Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Here we study a Bose Einstein Condensate beam splitter, realized with a double well potential of tunable height. We analyze how the sensitivity of a Mach Zehnder interferometer is degraded by the non-linear particle-particle interaction during the splitting dynamics. We distinguish three regimes, Rabi, Josephson and Fock, and associate to them a different scaling of the phase sensitivity with the total number of particles.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0605271,
title = {Non-Linear Beam Splitter in Bose-Einstein Condensate Interferometers},
author = {L. Pezze' and A. Smerzi and G. P. Berman and A. R. Bishop and L. A. Collins},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0605271},
year = {2009}
}