Atom interferometry with a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate.
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 39K condensate trapped in an optical lattice, where Bloch oscillations are forced by gravity. The fine-tuning of the scattering length down to 0.1 a_(0) and the micrometric sizes of the atomic sample make our system a very promising 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.
Fattori
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M
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Firenze, and INFM-CNR Via Nello Carrara 1, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.
D'Errico
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C
Roati
G
G
Zaccanti
M
M
Jona-Lasinio
M
M
Modugno
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M
Inguscio
M
M
Modugno
G
G