An atom chip interferometer

Abstract

We have realized an interferometer using a thermal cloud of magnetically trapped rubidium 87 atoms on a chip. The interferometer resembles a Ramsey interferometer with a state selective spatial splitting of the two internal states as proposed in [M. Ammar, and al., Phys. Rev. A, 91, 053623]. The splitting is effected by microwave fields from two on-chip waveguides while the atoms remain magnetically trapped. The inferred maximum separation is $1.2\pm 0.1~μ$m. We observe interference fringes with a contrast around 8\% limited by velocity difference of the two interferometer states when we close the interferometer. We develop a model describing this contrast decay.