JAPC - Atom interferometry; like ships in the ultracold night

Speaker: Dr. Michael Bromley, SDSU Department of Physics

Topic: "Atom interferometry; like ships in the ultracold night"

Time: 2:00 PM, Friday, October 10th, 2008

Place: P-148 (refreshments will be served at 1:45 PM in P145A)

Abstract: Simple circular waveguides promise to be an ideal architecture for building high-precision matter-wave interferometers that exploit the coherent source of atoms provided by Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). We have performed calculations using the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation to explore gravity-induced quantum interference produced by the collision of counterpropagating BECs in a circular waveguide system. The emphasis, here, being on the roles that the launch and nonlinear interactions have on the feasibility of extracting phase shifts. Our results vividly illustrate the good prospects, but significant challenges in performing quantum atom optics experiments in multi-dimensional geometries.

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