Wave-packet evolution during laser pulses driving an atomic clock transition

Abstract

Single-photon optical transitions enable novel applications of atom interferometry to dark-matter and gravitational-wave detection. This work investigates the wave-packet evolution for an atom's center of mass during a laser pulse driving such a transition. Particular attention is paid to the effects of finite pulse duration on the central trajectory of the atomic wave packets and the phase that they acquire in the diffraction process. While the resulting deviations of the central trajectories are typically quite small, they can have a significant impact on the interferometric phase shift in high-precision measurements and a detailed analysis is therefore important. Our approach relies on a description of the matter-wave propagation in terms of central trajectories and centered wave packets.