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Three-path atom interferometry with large momentum separation

Atomic Physics 2018-09-28 v3 Quantum Gases

Abstract

We demonstrate the scale up of a symmetric three-path contrast interferometer to large momentum separation. The observed phase stability at separation of 112 photon recoil momenta (112k112\hbar k) exceeds the performance of earlier free-space interferometers. In addition to the symmetric interferometer geometry and Bose-Einstein condensate source, the robust scalability of our approach relies crucially on the suppression of undesired diffraction phases through a careful choice of atom optics parameters. The interferometer phase evolution is quadratic with number of recoils, reaching a rate as high as 7×1077\times10^7 radians/s. We discuss the applicability of our method towards a new measurement of the fine-structure constant and a test of QED.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.06738,
  title  = {Three-path atom interferometry with large momentum separation},
  author = {Benjamin Plotkin-Swing and Daniel Gochnauer and Katherine E. McAlpine and Eric S. Cooper and Alan O. Jamison and Subhadeep Gupta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.06738},
  year   = {2018}
}
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