High-fidelity manipulation of a Bose-Einstein condensate using an optical standing wave

Abstract

The use of off-resonant standing light waves to manipulate ultracold atoms is investigated. Previous work has illustrated that Bragg diffraction can provide efficient beam-splitting and reflection operations for atomic wave packets. The performance of these operations is characterized experimentally using Bose-Einstein condensates confined in a weak magnetic trap. Fidelities of 0.99 for beam splitting and 0.98 for reflection are observed, and splitting operations of up to third order are achieved. The dependence of the operations on light intensity and atomic velocity is measured and found to agree well with theoretical estimates.