International Workshop on Atomic Interactions in Laser Fields - Abstracts
Matthias Büchner, Caroline Champenois, Christophe Boisseau, Rémi Delhuille, Leszek Jozefowski, Carlo Rizzo and Jacques Vigué
Laboratoire COLLISIONS AGRÉGATS RÉACTIVITE,
IRSAMC
Université‚ PAUL SABATIER et CNRS UMR 5589
118, route de NARBONNE, 31062 TOULOUSE Cedex, FRANCE
e-mail : jacques@yosemite.ups-tlse.fr
Atomic interferometry is a new and rapidly developing field (for a recent review, see reference [1]). Many different types of experiments have been devised and in this talk, we will consider only the case where the various interfering paths correspond to the same internal state of the atoms but to different trajectories. This type of experiments remains quite difficult because, if we except the case of cold atoms, the de Broglie wavelengths for atoms is extremely small: for instance, it is equal to 0.05 nm for Lithium atoms having a velocity equal to l000 m/s. Therefore, some tricks are necessary to build an interferometer and the most commonly used design is the MACH-ZEHNDER design with three gratings, following an idea of CLAUSER [2]. With this design, a few apparatuses have been built by the research groups of D. PRITCHARD at MIT (with Sodium atoms or dimers and material gratings), of SIU AU LEE at Fort Collins (with metastable Neon atoms and laser standing waves used as gratings) and of A. ZEILINGER at Innsbrück (with metastable Argon atoms and laser standing waves as gratings) and we will review briefly the principle of these interferometers.
We are presently building such an apparatus using Lithium and diffraction on laser standing waves and we have made a detailed calculation of the fringe contrast [3]. We will describe the design of our apparatus which will hopefully operate soon.
Finally, we will discuss some interesting applications of this technique: