Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Abstract:  In a Ramsey-Bordé interferometer for atoms, an atomic beam is split and recombined by exploiting the momentum transfer that atoms obtain when they absorb and emit light from a carefully arranged set of laser beams. Ramsey-Bordé interferometers are very flexible because they do not require mechanical gratings. They can be set up to eliminate the influence of unwanted effects, such as the reduction of fringe visibility due to the Doppler effect. In this talk, a proposal for a Ramsey-Bordé interferometer for electrons is presented, in which the Kapitza-Dirac effect for counter-propagating laser pulses is used to transfer a specific amount of momentum to electrons.

As an application of such an interferometer, the measurement of relativistic Lorentz contraction of the distance between two interferometer arms will be discussed. For electrons that have been accelerated to relativistic velocities, this contraction will prevent the recombination of the two paths and thus reduce fringe visibility. The proposed experiment may be considered as a realization of Bell's spaceship paradox in electron interferometry.

Biography:  Peter Marzlin received his PhD in 1994 from the University of Konstanz, Germany, where he worked on atom interferometry in curved space under the supervision of Jürgen Audretsch. After postdoctoral positions in Konstanz and at the Macquarie University in Sydney, he received the Habilitation for Theoretical Physics in 2001. He worked as senior researcher at the Institute for Quantum Information Science at the University of Calgary for five years before he joined St. Francis Xavier University in 2008. He is currently Chair of the Department of Physics.