Measuring Energy Differences by BEC Interferometry on a Chip

Abstract

We investigate the use of a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped on an atom chip for making interferometric measurements of small energy differences. We measure and explain the noise in the energy difference of the split condensates, which derives from statistical noise in the number difference. We also consider systematic errors. A leading effect is the variation of the rf magnetic field in the trap with distance from the wires on the chip surface. This can produce energy differences that are comparable with those due to gravity.

Effect of interparticle interaction in a free-oscillation atomic interferometer

“…Nevertheless, some remarkable progress has been made using Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) as resources [3,9,10]. For example, in the presence of attractive interactions these allow for the formation of bright soliton states, which are nondispersive and have been suggested as good candidates for the creation of macroscopic spatial superpositions [11][12][13][14].…”

Quantitative study of quasi-one-dimensional Bose gas experiments via the stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation

“…A number of experiments have recently probed the physics of highly-elongated finite temperature Bose gases at equilibrium, including the direct observation and analysis of density [17,20,22] and phase fluctuations [23][24][25][26][27]. Understanding the properties of matter waves in such geometries is of key importance to atom interferometers [28][29][30][32][33][34][35][36] and atom chips [31,[37][38][39][40][41][42].…”

Impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate in a double well

“…In recent years, a large number of experiments have been performed upon atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) trapped in double-well potentials (see, e.g., [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]). Each atom can be in a superposition of being in both wells, allowing for studies of macroscopic quantum coherence [1][2][3]5,[15][16][17][18] analogous to that found in a Josephson junction [4,8,13,[19][20][21][22].…”