Observation of interference between two molecular Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We have observed interference between two Bose-Einstein condensates of weakly bound Feshbach molecules of fermionic ${}^6$Li atoms. Two condensates are prepared in a double-well trap and, after release from this trap, overlap in expansion. We detect a clear interference pattern that unambiguously demonstrates the de Broglie wavelength of molecules. We verify that only the condensate fraction shows interference. For increasing interaction strength, the pattern vanishes because elastic collisions during overlap remove particles from the condensate wave function. For strong interaction the condensates do not penetrate each other as they collide hydrodynamically.

References in corpus (17)

• Theory of ultracold Fermi gases
• Atom Interferometers
• Vortices and Superfluidity in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation of Molecules
• Non-equilibrium coherence dynamics in one-dimensional Bose gases
• Crossover from a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate to a degenerate Fermi gas
• Pure Gas of Optically Trapped Molecules Created from Fermionic Atoms
• Precision Measurements of Collective Oscillations in the BEC-BCS Crossover
• Diatomic molecules in ultracold Fermi gases - Novel composite bosons
• Collective oscillations of a Fermi gas in the unitarity limit: Temperature effects and the role of pair correlations
• Finite-Temperature Collective Dynamics of a Fermi Gas in the BEC-BCS Crossover
• Dynamics of a strongly interacting Fermi gas: the radial quadrupole mode
• Collisions between tunable halo dimers: exploring an elementary four-body process with identical bosons
• Superfluid Expansion of a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Interferences in the density of two Bose-Einstein condensates consisting of identical or different atoms
• Interaction-induced interference for two independent Bose-Einstein condensates
• Matter-wave interference in s-wave and p-wave Fermi condensates

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Testing the limits of quantum mechanical superpositions
• Emergence of coherence in a uniform quasi-two-dimensional Bose gas
• Two-terminal transport measurements with cold atoms
• Interferometric measurement of the current-phase relationship of a superfluid weak link
• Talbot-enhanced, maximum-visibility imaging of condensate interference
• Statistical signatures of states orthogonal to the Fock-state ladder of composite bosons