Light Scattering to Determine the Relative Phase of Two Bose-Einstein Condensates

Abstract

We demonstrated an experimental technique based on stimulated light scattering to continuously sample the relative phase of two spatially separated Bose-Einstein condensates of atoms. The phase measurement process created a relative phase between two condensates with no initial phase relation, read out the phase, and monitored the phase evolution. This technique was used to realize interferometry between two trapped Bose-Einstein condensates without need for splitting or recombining the atom cloud.