THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL-STUDY OF THE BRAGG SCATTERING OF ATOMS FROM A STANDING LIGHT-WAVE

We study up to the sixth order of Bragg deflection of metastable neon atoms from a standing light wave, corresponding to a momentum transfer of 12HBARk. We derive an analytical result for the scattering probabi lity, suitable for arbitrarily high Bragg order, and demonstrate its a greement with experimental results. We investigate the effect of veloc ity distribution on the Bragg process and show that overlapping diffra ction orders can be resolved in velocity space. The prospect of using Bragg scattering as the optics in a Mach-Zehnder style atom interferom eter with large splitting is discussed.