A fidelity treatment of near-resonant states in the atom-optics kicked rotor

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of the atom-optics δ-kicked rotor in the vicinity of quantum resonance. Although small deviations from resonant conditions lead to a negligible change in the momentum space probability density, they lead to a significant relative phase change between the different momentum states taking part in the dynamics. By adding a tailored pulse to the kicked rotor pulse sequence, one can measure the overlap between the resonant state and any other state, i.e. perform a fidelity measurement. Using this sequence, we predict a narrow peak around quantum resonance with a width that scales as 1/N3 with N being the number of pulses in the kicked rotor sequence. This method may be of interest to precision measurements, such as h/M.