Observation of Free-Space Single-Atom Matterwave Interference

Abstract

We observe matterwave interference of a single cesium atom in free fall. The interferometer is an absolute sensor of acceleration and we show that this technique is sensitive to forces at the level of $3.2\times 10^{-27}$ N with a spatial resolution at the micron scale. We observe the build up of the interference pattern one atom at a time in an interferometer where the mean path separation extends far beyond the coherence length of the atom. Using the coherence length of the atom wavepacket as a metric, we directly probe the velocity distribution and measure the temperature of a single atom in free fall.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Atom Interferometers
• 6-axis inertial sensor using cold-atom interferometry
• Precision measurement of gravity with cold atoms in an optical lattice and comparison with a classical gravimeter
• Real-time single-molecule imaging of quantum interference
• Gravitational Wave Detection with Atom Interferometry
• Energy distribution and cooling of a single atom in an optical tweezer
• Digital atom interferometer with single particle control on a discretized spacetime geometry

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