2024/10/14 by Yuchen Zhang, Haowen Cheng, Zhang, Yu-Chen +16 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Fiber Laser Technologies #Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph) #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications #Optics (physics.optics) #Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.10664
openalex publication_date 2024/10/14 · openalex created_date 2024/10/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In 1927, during the fifth Solvay Conference, Einstein and Bohr described a double-slit interferometer with a "movable slit" that can detect the momentum recoil of one photon. Here, we report a faithful realization of the Einstein-Bohr interferometer using a single atom in an optical tweezer, cooled to the motional ground state in three dimensions. The single atom has an intrinsic momentum uncertainty comparable to a single photon, which serves as a movable slit obeying the minimum Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The atom's momentum wavefunction is dynamically tunable by the tweezer laser power, which enables observation of an interferometric visibility reduction at a shallower trap, demonstrating the quantum nature of this interferometer. We further identify classical noise due to atom heating and precession, illustrating a quantum-to-classical transition.