Abstract

In the optical regime, multiple beam interference is a popular method to drastically enhance the resolution of an interferometer. We report here on the realization of a multiple beam interferometer with matter waves. An atom is coherently split into more than two atomic wavepackets by optical pumping into a velocity dependent multilevel dark superposition slate. The momenta of two adjacent paths differ by two photon momenta. When the atom is spatially recombined, we observe an interference signal that shows an Airy-funclion like pattern characteristic for multiple beam interference. This method offers the prospect of achieving a very high resolution, since the enclosed area is larger than that of the corresponding conventional two-beam interferometer.

© 1996 IEEE