COHERENCE OF THE 2-LEVEL ATOM BICHROMATIC BEAM SPLITTER

The recently proposed two-level atom bichromatic beam splitter has bee n shown theoretically to give exceptionally clean beam splitting in mo mentum space. In this paper, we investigate the first-order coherence property of this beam splitter, which is an important test of its usef ulness in interferometric applications. We find that the beam splitter exhibits maximum fringe visibility of 0.3, which may be increased sig nificantly through conditioning on certain variables. We then propose a type of atom interferometer based on this system, which has many des irable properties when compared with existing versions.