A multibeam atom laser: coherent atom beam splitting from a single far detuned laser

摘要

We report the experimental realisation of a multibeam atom laser. A singlecontinuous atom laser is outcoupled from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) viaan optical Raman transition. The atom laser is subsequently split into up tofive atomic beams with slightly different momenta, resulting in multiple,nearly co-propagating, coherent beams which could be of use in interferometricexperiments. The splitting process itself is a novel realization of Braggdiffraction, driven by each of the optical Raman laser beams independently.This presents a significantly simpler implementation of an atomic beamsplitter, one of the main elements of coherent atom optics.