Wednesday, March 20, 2013

1303.4599 (Marcin Witkowski et al.)

Matter-Wave Interference versus Spontaneous Pattern Formation in Spinor
Bose-Einstein Condensate
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Marcin Witkowski, Rafal Gartman, Bartlomiej Nagorny, Marcin Piotrowski, Marcin Plodzien, Krzysztof Sacha, Jacek Szczepkowski, Jerzy Zachorowski, Michal Zawada, Wojciech Gawlik
We report on the observation of matter-wave interference of spinor states in anti-ferromagnetic $^{87}$Rb Bose-Einstein condensate. The components of the F=2 manifold are populated by forced Majorana transitions and then fall freely due to gravity and expand in an applied magnetic field. Weak inhomogeneities of the magnetic field present in the experiment impose relative velocities to different $m_F$ components, which show up as interference patterns upon measurement of atomic density distributions with a Stern-Gerlach (SG) imaging method. The resulting matter-wave interference patterns mimic spontaneous pattern formation in the antiferromagnetic quantum gas. We show that similar interference effects may appear also in other experiments where very weak inhomogeneities of the magnetic fields, difficult to avoid, are present and the duration of the interaction is long enough. We analyze the conditions of two other recent experiments and show that non-negligible effects produced by the gradient or curvature of the axial magnetic field component are to be expected.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.4599

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