Paper detail

Implementation of a double-path multimode interferometer using a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate

We realize a double-path multimode matter wave interferometer with spinor Bose-Einstein condensate and observe clear spatial interference fringes as well as a periodic change of the visibility in the time domain, which we refer to as the time domain interference and which is different from the traditional double-path interferometer. By changing the relative phase of the two paths, we find that the spatial fringes first lose coherence and recover. As the number of modes increases, the time domain interference signal with the narrower peaks is observed, which is beneficial to the improvement of the resolution of the phase measurement. We also investigated the influence of initial phase configuration and phase evolution rate between different modes in the two paths. With enhanced resolution, the sensitivity of interferometric measurements of physical observables can also be improved by properly assigning measurable quantities to the relative phase between two paths.