A Bright Solitonic Matter-Wave Interferometer
Abstract
We present the first realisation of a solitonic atom interferometer. A Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms of rubidium-85 is loaded into a horizontal optical waveguide. Through the use of a Feshbach resonance, the -wave scattering length of the Rb atoms is tuned to a small negative value. This attractive atomic interaction then balances the inherent matter-wave dispersion, creating a bright solitonic matter wave. A Mach-Zehnder interferometer is constructed by driving Bragg transitions with the use of an optical lattice co-linear with the waveguide. Matter wave propagation and interferometric fringe visibility are compared across a range of -wave scattering values including repulsive, attractive and non-interacting values. The solitonic matter wave is found to significantly increase fringe visibility even compared with a non-interacting cloud.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1403.3485,
title = {A Bright Solitonic Matter-Wave Interferometer},
author = {Gordon D. McDonald and Carlos C. N. Kuhn and Kyle S. Hardman and Shayne Bennetts and Patrick J. Everitt and Paul A. Altin and John E. Debs and John D. Close and Nicholas P. Robins},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.3485},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
6 pages, 4 figures