Abstract
We have observed interference fringes between two atomic wavepackets which have been spatially separated and recombined by means of adiabatic transfer in a 3-level system driven by delayed laser pulses. This technique is very promising, since it should allow efficient transfer of a large number of additional photon momenta to the atomic wavepackets within the interferometer, and thus allow a significantly improved measurement of the photon recoil energy,1 and may open the way to large area atom interferometers. In preliminary experiments using these pulses, we have obtained transfer efficiencies of >95% with net transfer of photon momenta and 98.6% for the Doppler-free case. From theoretical calculations, we expect a coherent transfer efficiency of 98.7%,2 the observed slightly lower efficiency for the Doppler-sensitive transitions is probably due by polarization imperfections (polarizations are harder to control for counter-propagating beams that for copropagating beams). We also showed, that in a pure 3-level system with laser pulses tuned precisely on resonsnce with the intermediate level, there is no AC- Stark shift even when the process is slightly non-adiabatic.
© 1994 Optical Society of America
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