Hydrogen atom interferometer with short light pulses

Abstract

We report the realization of a hydrogen atom interferometer experiment using light as the atomic beam splitter. The wave packets of hydrogen atoms excited to the metastable 2S state are coherently split up and later recombined with the help of intense nanosecond light pulses. The pulses are generated by a novel phase-coherent source. These experiments can be seen as a step towards a precision measurement of the recoil energy of a hydrogen atom when absorbing a photon and thus of ℏ/mhydrogen.