Ramsey interferometry with ultracold atoms

Abstract

We examine the passage of ultracold two-level atoms through two separated laser fields for the nonresonant case. We show that implications of the atomic quantized motion change dramatically the behavior of the interference fringes compared to the semiclassical description of this optical Ramsey interferometer. Using two-channel recurrence relations we are able to express the double-laser scattering amplitudes by means of the single-laser ones and to give explicit analytical results. When considering slower and slower atoms, the transmission probability of the system changes considerably from an interference behavior to a regime where scattering resonances prevail. This may be understood in terms of different families of trajectories that dominate the overall transmission probability in the weak field or in the strong field limit.