Abstract

Atomic interferometers are expected to be used as sensitive accelerometers in a variety of precision measurements such as tests of relativistic effects or quantum mechanics. Several versions of the atomic interferometer have been already presented. Four laser beams traveling in the same direction that split and reflect atomic beam also compose an atomic interferometer, like the Mach-Zehnder optical interferometer. Recently we demonstrated experimentally this atom interferometer with a visibility of 16% using a thermal calcium beam.¹ In this paper, we describe a theoretical description of this atom interferometer based on the evolution matrices of spinors² and compare the calculated results with the experimental those.

© 1995 IEEE