The Role of Source Coherence in Atom Interferometery
Atomic Physics
2015-06-18 v1
Abstract
The role of source cloud spatial coherence in a Mach-Zehnder type atom interferometer is experimentally investigated. The visibility and contrast of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and three thermal sources with varying spatial coherence are compared as a function of interferometer time. At short times, the fringe visibility of a BEC source approaches 100 % nearly independent of pi pulse efficiency, while thermal sources have fringe visibilities limited to the mirror efficiency. More importantly for precision measurement systems, the BEC source maintains interference at interferometer times significantly beyond the thermal source.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1312.0675,
title = {The Role of Source Coherence in Atom Interferometery},
author = {Kyle S. Hardman and Carlos C. N. Kuhn and Gordon D. McDonald and John E. Debs and Shayne Bennetts and John D. Close and Nicholas P. Robins},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.0675},
year = {2015}
}