interferometry

In this episode of Relatively Certain, JQI Adjunct Fellow Marianna Safronova and JQI Fellow Charles Clark return to discuss the limits of our understanding of gravity, and how new experiments with atom interferometers may be the key to not only a higher-precision understanding of gravity but also possible new physics.

For the first time, a team including scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and JQI have used neutron beams to create holograms of large solid objects, revealing their interior details in ways that ordinary holograms do not.Holograms—flat images that look like three-dimensional objects—owe their striking look to interfering waves. Both matter and light behave like waves at the smallest scales, and just like water waves traveling on the surface of the pond, waves of matter or light can combine to create information-rich interference patterns.Illuminating an object with a laser can create an optical hologram. But instead of merely photographing the light reflected from the object, a hologram records how the reflected light waves interfere with each other. The resulting patterns, based on the waves’ phase differences, or relative positions of their peaks and valleys, contain far more information about an object’s appearance than a simple photo. Generally, though, they don’t reveal much about its interior.

Phil Schewe discusses how matter, such as atoms and electrons, can display wave-like properties. Steve Rolston describes early scattering experiments. Gretchen Campbell talks about matter waves in the context of modern Bose-Einstein condensate experiments.