Atom interferometry with a weakly-interacting Bose Einstein condensate

Abstract

We demonstrate the operation of an atom interferometer based on a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate. We strongly reduce the interaction induced decoherence that usually limits interferometers based on trapped condensates by tuning the s-wave scattering length almost to zero via a magnetic Feshbach resonance. We employ a ${}^{39}$K condensate trapped in an optical lattice, where Bloch oscillations are forced by gravity. With a control of the scattering length better that 0.1 $a_0$ we achieve coherence times of several hundreds of ms. The micrometric sizes of the atomic sample make our sensor an ideal candidate for measuring forces with high spatial resolution. Our technique can be in principle extended to other measurement schemes opening new possibilities in the field of trapped atom interferometry.

5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Matter-wave interferometry in a double well on an atom chip
• Bloch oscillations of ultracold atoms: a tool for a metrological determination of $h/m_{Rb}$

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Atom Interferometers
• Magnetic dipolar interaction in an atomic Bose Einstein condensate interferometer
• Steady-state nonequilibrium density of states of driven strongly correlated lattice models in infinite dimensions
• Stable Bloch oscillations of cold atoms with time-dependent interaction
• Andreev reflection in bosonic condensates
• Thomas-Fermi Approximation for a Condensate with Higher-order Interactions
• Quantum noise thermometry for bosonic Josephson junctions in the mean field regime
• Bose-Einstein condensates in disordered potentials