Stern-Gerlach Interferometry with the Atom Chip

Understand

In this invited review in honor of 100 years since the Stern-Gerlach (SG) experiments, we describe a decade of SG interferometry on the atom chip.

• The SG effect has been a paradigm of quantum mechanics throughout the last century, but there has been surprisingly little evidence that the original scheme, with freely propagating atoms exposed to gradients from macroscopic magnets, is a fully coherent quantum process.
• Specifically, no full-loop SG interferometer (SGI) has been realized with the scheme as envisioned decades ago.
• Furthermore, several theoretical studies have explained why it is a formidable challenge.