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Tony D Roberts

Publications and source records attributed to Tony D Roberts.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Dispersion compensation for atom interferometry.

A new technique for maintaining high contrast in an atom interferometer is used to measure large de Broglie wave phase shifts. Dependence of an interaction induced phase on the atoms' velocity is compensated by applying an engineered counterphase. The counterphase is equivalent to a rotation, is precisely determined by a frequency, and can be used to measure phase shifts due to interactions of unknown strength. Phase shifts of 150 rad (5 times larger than previously possible) have now been measured in an atom beam interferometer, and we suggest that this technique can enable comparisons of atomic polarizability with precision of one part in 10,000.

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Glory oscillations in the index of refraction for matter waves.

We have measured the index of refraction for sodium de Broglie waves in gases of Ar, Kr, Xe, and N2 over a wide range of sodium velocities. We observe glory oscillations--a velocity-dependent oscillation in the forward scattering amplitude. An atom interferometer was used to observe glory oscillations in the phase shift caused by the collision, which are larger than glory oscillations observed in the cross section. The glory oscillations depend sensitively on the shape of the interatomic potential, allowing us to discriminate among various predictions for these potentials, none of which completely agrees with our measurements.

Journal Article↗