Incomplete Erasure of Which-Way Information Encoded in Atomic Hyperfine States
WEN Ling-Hua1,2,3, LIU Min1,2,3, KONG Ling-Bo1,2,3, ZHAN Ming-Sheng1,2
1State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance and Atomic and Molecular Physics, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071
2Center for Cold Atom Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071
3Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080
Incomplete Erasure of Which-Way Information Encoded in Atomic Hyperfine States
1State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance and Atomic and Molecular Physics, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071
2Center for Cold Atom Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071
3Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080
Abstract： We propose an experimental scheme to investigate incomplete erasure of which-way information encoded in atomic hyperfine states. Due to the incomplete erasure of the which-way information, it is shown that the interference patterns of the atomic wave packets initially confined in a spin-dependent optical lattice are destroyed to a certain extent, which provides a new straight way to test further the validity of the theoretical model developed in our recent work. The remarkable merit of the proposal is that it is simple and can be implemented easily.
2005, Vol. 22 
