Interference of Bose-Einstein condensates in momentum space

Abstract

We suggest an experiment to investigate the linear superposition of two spatially separated Bose-Einstein condensates. Due to the coherent combination of the two wave functions, the dynamic structure factor, measurable through inelastic photon scattering at high momentum transfer $q$, is predicted to exhibit interference fringes with frequency period $Δν= q/md$ where $d$ is the distance between the condensates. We show that the coherent configuration corresponds to an eigenstate of the physical observable measured in the experiment and that the relative phase of the condensates is hence created through the measurement process.