Eur. Phys. J. D 36, 89-94 (2005)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2005-00081-1

Interference of Bose-Einstein condensates and entangled single-atom state in a spin-dependent optical lattice

¹ State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance and Atomic and Molecular Physics, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, P.R. China
² Center for Cold Atom Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, P.R. China
³ Graduate school, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, P.R. China

Corresponding authors: ^a wenlinghua@wipm.ac.cn - ^b xionghongwei@wipm.ac.cn - ^c mszhan@wipm.ac.cn

Received: 24 November 2004
Revised: 8 March 2005
Published online: 7 June 2005

Abstract

We present a theoretical model to investigate the interference of an array of Bose-Einstein condensates loaded in a one-dimensional spin-dependent optical lattice, which is based on an assumption that for the atoms in the entangled single-atom state between the internal and the external degrees of freedom each atom interferes only with itself. Our theoretical results agree well with the interference patterns observed in a recent experiment by Mandel et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 010407 (2003)]. In addition, an experimental suggestion of nonuniform phase distribution is proposed to test further our theoretical model and prediction. The present work shows that the entanglement of a single atom is sufficient for the interference of the condensates confined in a spin-dependent optical lattice and this interference is irrelevant with the phases of individual condensates, i.e., this interference arises only between each condensate and itself and there is no interference effect between two arbitrary different condensates.